The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had A Lab Origin

9/2/2020 The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin
BIOTECHNOLOGY, COMMENTARIES, HEALTH JUNE 2, 2020
The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had
a Lab Origin
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-case-is-building-that-covid-19-had-a-lab-origin/ 1/47
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By Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD
If the public has learned a lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic it is that science does not
generate certainty. Do homemade face masks work? What is the death rate of COVID-19?
How accurate are the tests? How many people have no symptoms? And so on. Practically
the lone undisputed assertion made so far is that all the nearest known genetic relatives
of its cause, the Sars-CoV-2 virus, are found in horseshoe bats (Zhou et al., 2020 ).
Therefore, the likely viral reservoir was a bat.

However, most of these ancestor-like bat coronaviruses cannot infect humans (Ge et al.,

2013 ). In consequence, from its beginning, a key question hanging over the pandemic
has been: How did a bat RNA virus evolve into a human pathogen that is both virulent 
and deadly?

The answer almost universally seized upon is that there was an intermediate species.
Some animal, perhaps a snake, perhaps a palm civet, perhaps a pangolin, served as a
temporary host. This bridging animal would probably have had an ACE2 cellular
receptor (the molecule which allows cellular entry of the virus) intermediate in protein
sequence (or at least structure) between the bat and the human one (Wan et al., 2020 ).
In the press and in the scientific literature, scenarios by which this natural zoonotic
transfer might have occurred have been endlessly mulled. Most were fuelled by early
findings that many of the earliest COVID-19 cases seem to have occurred in and around
Wuhan’s Huanan live animal market. [The latest data are that 14 of the 41 earliest cases,
including the first, had no connection to the animal market (Huang et al. 2020 )].
Since the two previous coronavirus near-pandemics of SARS (2002-3) and MERS (2012)
both probably came from bats and both are thought (but not proven) to have
transitioned to humans via intermediate animals (civets and dromedaries respectively),

a natural zoonotic pathway is a reasonable first assumption (Andersen et al., 2020 ).
The
idea, as
it
applied
to the
original
(2002)
SARS
outbrea
k, is that

the
original 
bat
virus Shi Zheng-Li releases a bat 

infected

a civet. The virus then evolved briefly in this animal species, but not enough to cause a
civet pandemic, and then was picked up by a human before it died out in civets. In this
first human (patient zero) the virus survived, perhaps only barely, but was passed on,
marking the first case of human to human transmission. As it was successively passed on
in its first few human hosts the virus rapidly evolved, adapting to better infect its new
hosts. After a few such tentative transmissions the pandemic proper began.
Perhaps this scenario is approximately how the current COVID-19 pandemic began.
But one other troubling possibility must be dispensed with. It follows from the fact that
the epicentre city, Wuhan (pop. 11 million), happens to be the global epicentre of bat
coronavirus research (e.g. Hu et al., 2017 ).
Prompted by this proximity, various researchers and news media , prominently the
Washington Post , and with much more data Newsweek , have drawn up a prima facie
case that a laboratory origin is a strong possibility (Zhan et al., 2020 ; Piplani et al., 2020
). That is, one of the two labs in Wuhan that has worked on coronaviruses accidentally
let a natural virus escape; or, the lab was genetically engineering (or otherwise
manipulating) a Sars-CoV-2-like virus which then escaped.
Unfortunately, in the US at least, the question of the pandemic’s origin has become a
political football; either an opportunity for Sinophobia or a partisan “blame game “.
But the potential of a catastrophic lab release is not a game and systemic problems of
competence and opacity are certainly not limited to China (Lipsitch, 2018 ). The US
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently constructing a new and expanded
national Bio and Agro-defense facility in Manhattan, Kansas . DHS has estimated that
the 50-year risk (defined as having an economic impact of $9-50 billion) of a release from
its lab at 70%.


When a National Research Council committee inspected these DHS estimates they 
concluded “The committee finds that the risks and costs could well be significantly

higher than that “.

A subsequent committee report (NAP, 2012 ) continued:
“the committee was instructed to judge the adequacy and validity of the uSSRA [updated
Site-Specific Risk Assessment]. The committee has identified serious concerns about (1) the
misapplication of methods used to assess risk, (2) the failure to make clear whether and
how the evidence used to support risk assessment assumptions had been thoroughly
reviewed and adequately evaluated, (3) the limited breadth of literature cited and the
misinterpretation of some of the significant supporting literature, (4) the failure to explain
the criteria used to select assumptions when supporting literature is conflicting, (5) the
failure to consider important risk pathways, and (6) the inadequate treatment of
uncertainty. Those deficiencies are not equally problematic, but they occur with sufficient
frequency to raise doubts about the adequacy and validity of the risk results presented. In
most instances (e.g., operational activities at the NBAF), the identified problems lead to an
underestimation of risk; in other instances (e.g., catastrophic natural hazards), the risks
may be overestimated. As a result, the committee concludes that the uSSRA is technically
inadequate in critical respects and is an insufficient basis on which to judge the risks
associated with the proposed NBAF in Manhattan, Kansas.”
China, meanwhile, having opened its first in Wuhan in 2018, is planning to roll out a
national network of BSL-4 labs (Yuan, 2019 ). Like many other countries, it is investing
significantly in disease surveillance and collection of viruses from wild animal

populations and in high-risk recombinant virus research with Potential Pandemic
Pathogens (PPPs).
On May 4th, nations and global philanthropies, meeting in Brussels, committed $7.4
billion to future pandemic preparedness. But the question hanging over all such
investments is this: the remit of the Wuhan lab at the centre of the accidental release

claims is pandemic preparedness. If the COVID-19 pandemic began there then we need 
to radically rethink current ideas for pandemic preparation globally. Many researchers
already believe we should, for the sake of both safety and effectiveness (Lipsitch and 
Galvani, 2014 ; Weiss et al., 2015 ; Lipsitch, 2018 ). The worst possible outcome would

be for those donated billions to accelerate the arrival of the next pandemic.
Historical lab releases, a brief history

An accidental lab release is not merely a theoretical possibility. In 1977 a laboratory in
Russia (or possibly China), most likely while developing a flu vaccine, accidentally
released the extinct H1N1 influenza virus (Nakajima et al., 1978 ). H1N1 went on to
become a global pandemic virus. A large proportion of the global population became
infected. In this case, deaths were few because the population aged over 20 yrs old had
historic immunity to the virus. This episode is not widely known because only recently
has this conclusion been formally acknowledged in the scientific literature and the
virology community has been reluctant to discuss such incidents (Zimmer and Burke,
2009 ; Wertheim, 2010 ). Still, laboratory pathogen escapes leading to human and
animal deaths (e.g. smallpox in Britain; equine encephalitis in South America) are
common enough that they ought to be much better known (summarised in Furmanski,
2014 ). Only rarely have these broken out into actual pandemics on the scale of H1N1,
which, incidentally, broke out again in 2009/2010 as “Swine flu” causing deaths estimated
variously at 3,000 to 200,000 on that occasion (Duggal et al., 2016 ; Simonsen et al. 2013
).
Many scientists have warned that experiments with PPPs, like the smallpox and Ebola
and influenza viruses, are inherently dangerous and should be subject to strict limits and
oversight (Lipsitch and Galvani, 2014 ; Klotz and Sylvester, 2014 ). Even in the limited
case of SARS-like coronaviruses, since the quelling of the original SARS outbreak in 2003,
there have been six documented SARS disease outbreaks originating from research
laboratories, including four in China. These outbreaks caused 13 individual infections
and one death (Furmanski, 2014). In response to such concerns the US banned certain
classes of experiments , called gain of function (GOF) experiments, with PPPs in 2014, 
but the ban (actually a funding moratorium ) was lifted in 2017.

For these reasons, and also to ensure the effectiveness of future pandemic preparedness
efforts, it is a matter of vital international importance to establish whether the 

laboratory escape hypothesis has credible evidence to support it. This must be done

regardless of the problem–in the US–of toxic partisan politics and nationalism.
The COVID-19 Wuhan lab escape thesis
The essence of the lab escape theory is that Wuhan is the site of the Wuhan Institute of
Virology (WIV), China’s first and only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility. (BSL-4 is the
highest pathogen security level). The WIV, which added a BSL-4 lab only in 2018, has
been collecting large numbers of coronaviruses from bat samples ever since the original
SARS outbreak of 2002-2003; including collecting more in 2016 (Hu, et al., 2017 ; Zhou et
al., 2018 ).
Led by researcher Zheng-Li Shi, WIV scientists have also published experiments in which
live bat coronaviruses were introduced into human cells (Hu et al., 2017). Moreover,
according to an April 14 article in the Washington Post, US Embassy staff visited the WIV
in 2018 and “had grave safety concerns ” about biosecurity there. The WIV is just eight
miles from the Huanan live animal market that was initially thought to be the site of
origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wuhan is also home to a lab called the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and
Control (WCDPC). It is a BSL-2 lab that is just 250 metres away from the Huanan market.
Bat coronaviruses have in the past been kept at the Wuhan WCDPC lab .
Thus the lab escape theory is that researchers from one or both of these labs may have
picked up a Sars-CoV-2-like bat coronavirus on one of their many collecting (aka ‘”virus
surveillance”) trips. Or, alternatively, a virus they were studying, passaging, engineering,
or otherwise manipulating, escaped.
Scienti c assessments of the lab escape theory

On April 17 the Australian Science Media Centre asked four Australian virologists: “Did

COVID-19 come from a lab in Wuhan? “
Three (Edward Holmes, Nigel McMillan and Hassan Vally) dismissed the lab escape

suggestion and Vally simply labeled it, without elaboration, a “conspiracy”. 
The fourth virologist interviewed was Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University. Petrovsky

first addressed the question of whether the natural zoonosis pathway was viable. He told
the Media Centre:
“no natural virus matching to COVID-19 has been found in nature despite an intensive
search to find its origins.”
That is to say, the idea of an animal intermediate is speculation. Indeed, no credible viral
or animal host intermediaries, either in the form of a confirmed animal host or a

plausible virus intermediate, has to-date emerged to explain the natural zoonotic
transfer of Sars-CoV-2 to humans (e.g. Zhan et al., 2020 ).
In addition to Petrovsky’s point, there are two further difficulties with the natural
zoonotic transfer thesis (apart from the weak epidemiological association between early
cases and the Huanan “wet” market).
The first is that researchers from the Wuhan lab travelled to caves in Yunnan (1,500 Km
away) to find horseshoe bats containing SARS-like coronaviruses. To-date, the closest
living relative of Sars-CoV-2 yet found comes from Yunnan (Ge et al., 2016 ). Why would
an outbreak of a bat virus therefore occur in Wuhan?
Moreover, China has a population of 1.3 billion. If spillover from the wildlife trade was
the explanation, then, other things being equal, the probability of a pandemic starting in
Wuhan (pop. 11 million) is less than 1%.
Zheng-Li Shi, the head of bat coronavirus research at WIV, told Scientific American as
much:
“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies
had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan 
have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly
bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could
they have come from our lab?”


Wuhan, in short, is a rather unlikely epicentre for a natural zoonotic transfer. In

contrast, to suspect that Sars-CoV-2 might have come from the WIV is both reasonable
and obvious.
Was Sars-CoV-2 created in a lab?

In his statement, Petrovsky goes on to describe the kind of experiment that, in principle,
if done in a lab, would obtain the same result as the hypothesised natural zoonotic
transfer–rapid adaptation of a bat coronavirus to a human host.
“Take a bat coronavirus that is not infectious to humans, and force its selection by
culturing it with cells that express human ACE2 receptor, such cells having been created
many years ago to culture SARS coronaviruses and you can force the bat virus to adapt to
infect human cells via mutations in its spike protein, which would have the effect of
increasing the strength of its binding to human ACE2, and inevitably reducing the strength
of its binding to bat ACE2.
Viruses in prolonged culture will also develop other random mutations that do not affect its
function. The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is
sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus. Because the
mutations are acquired randomly by selection there is no signature of a human gene jockey,
but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention.”
In other words, Petrovsky believes that current experimental methods could have led to
an altered virus that escaped.
Passaging, GOF research, and lab escapes

The experiment mentioned by Petrovsky represents a class of experiments called
passaging. Passaging is the placing of a live virus into an animal or cell culture to which
it is not adapted and then, before the virus dies out, transferring it to another animal or

cell of the same type. Passaging is often done iteratively. The theory is that the virus will
rapidly evolve (since viruses have high mutation rates) and become adapted to the new 
animal or cell type. Passaging a virus, by allowing it to become adapted to its new
situation, creates a new pathogen.


The most famous such experiment was conducted in the lab of Dutch researcher Ron 
Fouchier. Fouchier took an avian influenza virus (H5N1) that did not infect ferrets (or
other mammals) and serially passaged it in ferrets. The intention of the experiment was
specifically to evolve a PPP. After ten passages the researchers found that the virus had
indeed evolved, to not only infect ferrets but to transmit to others in neighbouring cages
(Herfst et al., 2012 ). They had created an airborne ferret virus, a Potential Pandemic
Pathogen, and a storm in the international scientific community.
The second class of experiments that have frequently been the recipients of criticism
are GOF experiments. In GOF research, a novel virus is deliberately created, either by in
vitro mutation or by cutting and pasting together two (or more) viruses. The intention of
such reconfigurations is to make viruses more infectious by adding new functions such
as increased infectivity or pathogenicity. These novel viruses are then experimented on,
either in cell cultures or in whole animals. These are the class of experiments banned in
the US from 2014 to 2017 .
Some researchers have even combined GOF and passaging experiments by using
recombinant viruses in passaging experiments (e.g. Sheahan et al., 2008 ).
Such experiments all require recombinant DNA techniques and animal or cell culture
experiments. But the very simplest hypothesis of how Sars-CoV-2 might have been
caused by research is simply to suppose that a researcher from the WIV or the WCDCP
became infected during a collecting expedition and passed their bat virus on to their
colleagues or family. The natural virus then evolved, in these early cases, into Sars-CoV-2.
For this reason, even collecting trips have their critics. Epidemiologist Richard Ebright
called them “the definition of insanity“. Handling animals and samples exposes
collectors to multiple pathogens and returning to their labs then brings those pathogens 
back to densely crowded locations.

Was the WIV doing experiments that might release PPPs?
Since 2004, shortly after the original SARS outbreak, researchers from the WIV have

been collecting bat coronaviruses in an intensive search for SARS-like pathogens (Li et 
al., 2005 ). Since the original collecting trip, many more have been conducted (Ge et al.,
2013 ; Ge et al., 2016 ; Hu et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018 ).
Petrovsky does not mention it but Zheng-Li Shi’s group at the WIV has already
performed experiments very similar to those he describes, using those collected viruses.
In 2013 the Shi lab reported isolating an infectious clone of a bat coronavirus that they
called WIV-1 (Ge et al., 2013). WIV-1 was obtained by introducing a bat coronavirus into
monkey cells, passaging it, and then testing its infectivity in human (HeLa) cell lines
engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor (Ge et al., 2013).
In 2014, just before the US GOF research ban went into effect, Zheng-Li Shi of WIV co-
authored a paper with the lab of Ralph Baric in North Carolina that performed GOF
research on bat coronaviruses (Menachery et al., 2015 ).
In this particular set of experiments the researchers combined “the spike of bat
coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone” into a single engineered
live virus. The spike was supplied by the Shi lab. They put this bat/human/mouse virus
into cultured human airway cells and also into live mice. The researchers observed
“notable pathogenesis” in the infected mice (Menachery et al. 2015). The mouse-adapted
part of this virus comes from a 2007 experiment in which the Baric lab created a virus
called rMA15 through passaging (Roberts et al., 2007 ). This rMA15 was “highly virulent
and lethal” to the mice. According to this paper, mice succumbed to “overwhelming viral
infection”.
In 2017, again with the intent of identifying bat viruses with ACE2 binding capabilities,
the Shi lab at WIV reported successfully infecting human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to
express the human ACE2 receptor with four different bat coronaviruses. Two of these
were lab-made recombinant (chimaeric) bat viruses. Both the wild and the recombinant 
viruses were briefly passaged in monkey cells (Hu et al., 2017).

Together, what these papers show is that: 1) The Shi lab collected numerous bat samples
with an emphasis on collecting SARS-like coronavirus strains, 2) they cultured live 
viruses and conducted passaging experiments on them, 3) members of Zheng-Li Shi’s

laboratory participated in GOF experiments carried out in North Carolina on bat
coronaviruses, 4) the Shi laboratory produced recombinant bat coronaviruses and
placed these in human cells and monkey cells. All these experiments were conducted in
cells containing human or monkey ACE2 receptors.
The overarching purpose of such work was to see whether an enhanced pathogen could
emerge from the wild by creating one in the lab. (For a very informative technical
summary of WIV research into bat coronaviruses and that of their collaborators we
recommend this post, written by biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin ).
It also seems that the Shi lab at WIV intended to do more of such research. In 2013 and
again in 2017 Zheng-Li Shi (with the assistance of a non-profit called the EcoHealth
Alliance ) obtained a grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The most
recent such grant proposed that:
“host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics,
pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of
cell cultures from different species and humanized mice” (NIH project #5R01Al110964-04
).
It is hard to overemphasize that the central logic of this grant was to test the pandemic
potential of SARS-related bat coronaviruses by making ones with pandemic potential,
either through genetic engineering or passaging, or both.
Apart from descriptions in their publications we do not yet know exactly which viruses
the WIV was experimenting with but it is certainly intriguing that numerous
publications since Sars-CoV-2 first appeared have puzzled over the fact that the SARS-
CoV-2 spike protein binds with exceptionally high affinity to the human ACE2 receptor
“at least ten times more tightly” than the original SARS (Zhou et al., 2020 ; Wrapp et al.,

2020 ; Wan et al., 2020 ; Walls et al., 2020 ; Letko et al., 2020 ). 
This affinity is all the more remarkable because of the relative lack of fit in modelling

studies of the SARS-CoV-2 spike to other species, including the postulated intermediates
like snakes, civets and pangolins (Piplani et al., 2020 ). In this preprint these modellers 
concluded “This indicates that SARS-CoV-2 is a highly adapted human pathogen”.
Given the research and collection history of the Shi lab at WIV it is therefore entirely
plausible that a bat SARS-like cornavirus ancestor of Sars-CoV-2 was trained up on the
human ACE2 receptor by passaging it in cells expressing that receptor.
[On June 4 an excellent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists went further.
Pointing out what we had overlooked, that the Shi lab also amplified spike proteins of
collected coronaviruses, which would make them available for GOF experimentation (Ge
et al., 2016).]
How do viruses escape from high security laboratories?

Pathogen lab escapes take various forms. According to the US Government
Accountability Office , a US defense Department laboratory once “inadvertently sent
live Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, to almost 200 laboratories
worldwide over the course of 12 years. The laboratory believed that the samples had
been inactivated.” In 2007, Britain experienced a foot and mouth disease outbreak. Its’
origin was a malfunctioning waste disposal system of a BSL-4 laboratory leaking into a
stream from which neighbouring cows drank. The disposal system had not been
properly maintained (Furmanski, 2014 ). In 2004 an outbreak of SARS originating from
the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Beijing, China, began, again, with the
inadequate inactivation of a viral sample that was then distributed to non-secure parts of
the building (Weiss et al., 2015 ).
Writing for the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists in February 2019, Lynn Klotz
concluded that human error was behind most laboratory incidents causing exposures to
pathogens in US high security laboratories. While equipment failure was also a factor, of 
the 749 incidents reported to the US Federal Select Agent Programme between 2009-2015,
Klotz concluded that 79% resulted from human error.

But arguably the biggest worry is incidents that go entirely unreported because escape of
the pathogen goes undetected. It is truly alarming that a significant number of pathogen

escape events were uncovered only because investigators were in the process of
examining a completely different incident (Furmanski, 2014). Such discoveries represent
strong evidence that pathogen escapes are under-reported and that important lessons
still need to be learned (Weiss et al., 2015).
The safety record of the WIV

The final important data point is the biosafety history of the WIV. The WIV was built in
2015 and became a commissioned BSL-4 lab in 2018. According to Josh Rogin of the
Washington Post, US embassy officials visited the WIV in 2018. They subsequently
warned their superiors in Washington of a “serious shortage of appropriately trained
technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment
laboratory”.
And according to VOA News , a year before the outbreak, “a security review conducted
by a Chinese national team found the lab did not meet national standards in five
categories.”
Credible reports from within China also question lab biosafety and its management. In
2019, Yuan Zhiming, biosecurity specialist at the WIV, cited the “challenges” of biosafety
in China. According to Yuan: “several high-level BSLs have insufficient operational funds
for routine yet vital processes” and “Currently, most laboratories lack specialized
biosafety managers and engineers.” He recommends that “We should promptly revise
the existing regulations, guidelines, norms, and standards of biosafety and biosecurity”.
Nevertheless, he also notes that China intends to build “5-7” more BSL-4 laboratories
(Yuan, 2019).
And in February 2020, Scientific American interviewed Zheng-Li Shi. Accompanying the
interview was a photograph of her releasing a captured bat. In the photo she is wearing 
a casual pink unzipped top layer, thin gloves, and no face mask or other protection. Yet
this is the same researcher whose talks give “chilling ” warnings about the dire risks of

human contact with bats.

All of which tends to confirm the original State Department assessment. As one

anonymous “senior administration official” told Rogin :
“The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it
leaked from a lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from
the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side.”
The leading hypothesis is a lab outbreak
For all these reasons, a lab escape is by far the leading hypothesis to explain the origins
of Sars-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. The sheer proximity of the WIV and WCDCP
labs to the outbreak and the nature of their work represents evidence that can hardly be
ignored. The long international history of lab escapes and the biosafety concerns from
all directions about the labs in Wuhan greatly strengthen the case. Especially since
evidence for the alternative hypothesis, in the form of a link to wild animal exposure or
the wildlife trade, remains extremely weak, being based primarily on analogy with SARS
one (Bell et al,. 2004 ; Andersen et al., 2020 ).
Nevertheless, on April 16th Peter Daszak, who is the President of the EcoHealth Alliance
, told Democracy Now! in a lengthy interview that the lab escape thesis was “Pure
baloney”. He told listeners :
“There was no viral isolate in the lab. There was no cultured virus that’s anything related
to SARS coronavirus 2. So it’s just not possible.”
Daszak made very similar claims on CBS’s Sixty Minutes: “There is zero evidence that this
virus came out of a lab in China.” Instead, Daszak encouraged viewers to blame “hunting
and eating wildlife”.
Daszak’s certainty is highly problematic on several counts. The closest related known 
coronaviruses to Sars-CoV-2 are to be found at the WIV so a lot depends on what he
means by “related to”. But it is also dishonest in the sense that Daszak must know that 
culturing in the lab is not the only way that WIV researchers could have caused an

outbreak. Third, and this is not Daszak’s fault, the media are asking the right question to
the wrong person. 
As alluded to above, Daszak is the named principal investigator on multiple US grants
that went to the Shi lab at WIV. He is also a co-author on numerous papers with Zheng-Li
Shi, including the 2013 Nature paper announcing the isolation of coronavirus WIV-1
through passaging (Ge et al., 2013). One of his co-authorships is on the collecting paper in
which his WIV colleagues placed the four fully functional bat coronaviruses into human
cells containing the ACE2 receptor (Hu et al. 2017). That is, Daszak and Shi together are
collaborators and co-responsible for most of the published high-risk collecting and
experimentation at the WIV.
An investigation is needed, but who will do it?

If the Shi lab has anything to hide, it is not only the Chinese Government that will be
reluctant to see an impartial investigation proceed . Much of the work was funded by
the US taxpayer, channeled there by Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance. Virtually
every credible international organisation that might in principle carry out such an
investigation, the WHO , the US CDC , the FAO , the US NIH , including the Gates
Foundation , is either an advisor to, or a partner of, the EcoHealth Alliance. If the Sars-
CoV-2 outbreak originated from the bat coronavirus work at the WIV then just about
every major institution in the global public health community is implicated.
But to solve many of these questions does not necessarily require an expensive
investigation. It would probably be enough to inspect the lab notebooks of WIV
researchers. All research scientists keep detailed notes, for intellectual property and
other reasons, but especially in BSL-4 labs. As Yuan Zhiming told Nature magazine in an
article marking the opening of the facility in Wuhan: “We tell them [staff] the most
important thing is that they report what they have or haven’t done.”
Meticulous lab records plus staff health records and incident reports of accidents and

near-accidents are all essential components (or should be ) of BSL work. Their main 
purpose is to enable the tracking of actual incidents. Much speculation could be ended
with the public release of that information. But the WIV has not provided it. 
This is puzzling since the Chinese government has a very strong incentive to produce 
those records. Complete transparency would potentially dispel the gales of blame coming
its way; especially on the question of whether Sars-CoV-2 has an engineered or passaged
origin. If Zheng-Li Shi and Peter Daszak are correct that nothing similar to Sars-CoV-2
was being studied there, then those notebooks should definitively exonerate the lab from
having knowingly made an Actual Pandemic Pathogen.
Given the simplicity and utility of this step this lack of transparency suggests that there is
something to hide. If so, it must be important. But then the question is: What?
A thorough investigation of the WIV and its bat coronavirus research is an important
first step. But the true questions are not the specific mishaps and dissemblings of Drs Shi
or Daszak, nor of the WIV, nor even of the Chinese government.
Rather, the bigger question concerns the current philosophy of pandemic prediction and
prevention. Deep enquiries should be made about the overarching wisdom of plucking
and counting viruses from the wild and then performing dangerous ‘what if’
recombinant research in high tech but fallible biosafety labs. This is a reductionistic
approach, we also note, that has so far failed to predict or protect us from pandemics
and may never do so.
END
Footnote: This article was updated on June 3rd to broaden the estimates of “Swine Flu”
deaths, from 3,000 to 3- to 200,000.
Note: On July 15th we published a follow-up to this article: “A Proposed Origin for
SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic” which carries the analysis above much
further and proposes exactly how Sars-CoV-2 might have escaped from the WIV. 
References

Andersen, K. G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W. I., Holmes, E. C., & Garry, R. F. (2020). The

proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature medicine, 26(4), 450-452.

Bell, D., Roberton, S., & Hunter, P. R. (2004). Animal origins of SARS coronavirus: possible
links with the international trade in small carnivores. Philosophical Transactions of the
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Comments
Lilian
JUNE 2, 2020 AT 3:58 PM REPLY
The best article I have ever read on this topic in the last ve months
Rossana Segreto
It is extremely important that researchers do not feel conspirators if they consider possible an
arti cial origin for SARS-CoV-2. It is absolutely possible and this article explain it very thoroughly. An
investigation is needed and it should consider all the labs involved in such projects. Thank you for
writing it.
Mary Saunders
Absolutely thorough and interesting, obviously written by someone expecting to get stung by

mosquitoes of a certain kind. Great job.

Juha Marila

Very interesting and enlightening article on a controversial topic. Thank you.

JAVIER
Very interesting and compelling work.

For further precise information follow article and comments here:
“Scienti c evidence and logic behind the claim that the Wuhan coronavirus is man-made”
https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/blog/scienti c-evidence-and-logic-behind-the-claim-that-the-
wuhan-coronavirus-is-man-made#comments
But one thing: Is it not naiv to think about availabilility and reliability of researchers booknotes?
When somebody states that “samples have been destroyed” What doe it mean?
Martin S
Javier,
nerdhaspower has a related blog post – https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-

fake.html where their Figure 3 (from early May) looks the same as Figure 4 from this
Science Magazine article –
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/28/sciadv.abb9153
(published end of May)
Where did nerdhaspower get the gure? Why is it in Science Magazine now?
JAVIER
JUNE 3, 2020 AT 8:53 AM REPLY
These gures are similar because both are comparing the same: the
w=non-synosynonymous/synonymous ratio in the particular S2 region of
the Spike proteine. The ratio 0.013 in the CoV19-RaTG13 is considered in
someone’s opinion very “unlikely natural” but others say that is “quite
natural” since this S2 region is a “well established” region not subject to
aminoacid changes (what is called “under strong (negative) or purifying
selection pressure”).

Anyway, from database genomes and bioinformatic software tools
someone can get these pictures.

Here, in these two videos ” Coronavirus: Are Our Scientists Lying To Us?”,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZUJhKUbd0k&feature=youtu.be 
and “More Evidence Covid-19 May *NOT* Be Natural”,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJzGqVyAtlg published by Chris 
Martenson’s-Peak Prosperity are shown easy to understand explanations
about these issues.
Martin S
The labels “Group A” and “Group B” match too. I suspect

that nerdhaspower is actually a member of the team that
wrote the Science Magazine paper, but they are afraid to
speak publicly.
Billy Zhang
Even from point of view of failure analysis, investigation into WIV lab is warranted. Outbreak of
pandemic is failure of public health management, and analysis of the failure ALWAYS starts with
where the failure rst occurs. Uncovering root causes (origin) of failure is the purpose of failure
analysis. If failure analysis leads to somewhere else as failure’s origin, so be it. But failure analysis
starts where the failure rst occurs. SARS-CoV-2 could come from a lab: https://bit.ly/2JxhyAM
G.
No mention of the US labs, American tax dollars, and many other international interests involved.
Mary Saunders
Mention of US funds used Is made in the article. “…investigation is needed, but who
will do it?
If the Shi lab has anything to hide, it is not only the Chinese Government that will be 
reluctant to see an impartial investigation proceed. Much of the work was funded by
the US taxpayer, channeled there by Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance. 
Virtually every credible international organisation that might in principle carry out
such an investigation, the WHO, the US CDC, the FAO, the US NIH, including the Gates 
Foundation, is either an advisor to, or a partner of, the EcoHealth Alliance. If the Sars-
CoV-2 outbreak originated from the bat coronavirus work at the WIV then just about 
every major institution in the global public health community is implicated.”
yano
Finally some people with a brain are looking into this. Don’t listen to the scientist (virologists) that
have con icts of interest with their pocket books. Those that are yelling the loudest, “This virus
came from nature”, have the most to lose from it actually coming from a lab. So obvious and
laughable.
Very nice common sense analysis, thank you! Let the science win!
Sean McMahon
From my time working in a laboratory, notebooks were extremely important. That’s a great point to
raise, hopefully a detailed investigation will follow from this.
Jesse Morrell
Excellent article! I just published a book on this called “The Wuhan Lab and the Mad Science Dr
Fauci Funded.” It got banned on Amazon. It’s forbidden. It’s on LuLu though.
Also, the Zhengli/Baric GOF experiment in 2014 was not right before the ban. It was right after. But
Fauci gave them an exemption because their grant was already funded. I have the email they
received. WIV continued to be funded for GOF during the ban.
Matthew Paul
Excellent comment. The FBI should put Baric and UNC in the hot seat and question
both intensively regarding the level of access that Wuhan personnel were granted to

the bat-covid samples. Additionally, UNC should disclose how much, if any, grant
funding was accepted by UNC, or its foundations, from China prior to Shi Zhengli

being accepted by Baric as a research partner. Federal laws against espionage may
have been broken.



joe
2009-2010 Swine Flu killed 3k?
These authors work for the Obama admin.?
Frank Bish
In JAN, Francis Boyle was interviewed on Geopolitics & Empire (yt). He spilt the beans then (all BSL-
4s leak, WIV funded partially by US, collusion between Chinese professors and US universities, and
on and on). YT pulled the interview, though there are follow-ups. DYOR on that.
Couple months ago, Chris Martenson asked, “… if this virus was organic, how do you explain the
presence of the polybasic furin cleavage site, PRRA?” That is, it would’ve taken nature many years to
evolve into this kind of molecular structure. Check his yt streams for more.
Boyle and Martenson have kept this college drop-out up-to-date. Sadly, I can’t recall a more sinister
cover-up loaded with an international cast of Oscar-stealing villians. And that’s over 60-years of
memories.
Anyway, keep up the good work.
Lila Rajiva
At last. A well-researched sturdily independent assessment that con rms what other independent-
minded experts have suggested from the start, only to be shouted down by the Gates foundation-
funded experts and the incestuous web of public health bodies that in uence not just policy but lab
research.
Gain-of-function research changes animal viruses to make them harmful to human beings using
the pretext that doing so helps defend against such mutations should they arise naturally. But they
rarely if ever do. But what does happen quite commonly are lab accidents. Bottom line – the
research is unethical, horribly dangerous, and a massive waste of research dollars. 
Thank you for doing the job that mainstream journalists no longer do.

charles y shao


The evidence I want to see is the serology of Ms. Shi and her colleagues. If they passed the virus,
they must have the IgG.
Palakkadan
Excellent article!
The most compelling information for me was the nding that the COVID-19 virus binds 10-fold
better to human ACE2 receptor than to the original SARS virus, and that it shows no such af nity in
other species (from modelling studies).
Brenda Delgadillo
Thank you for the lovely article. I truly enjoyed it. I’m not a virologist, although I do come from a
different scienti c background, and this article really breaks down the statistical probability that
there is for human error leading to a virus “leak”, and how viruses can change or be changed to start
infecting different hosts. I’m confused on a few things (and this may be due to my lack of political
understanding of lack of virology understanding):
1) why would some of the “major” (more well known) virologist suggest that this is not lab made?
2) even though the notes from WIV scientists have not been examined, Dr. Zhengli claims to of have
compared the COVID-19 strain with other viral strains studied in her lab, which do not remotely
match (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-scientists-think-of-the-
coronavirus-was-made-in-a-lab-rumour/amp ). Does this mean that there is a possibility of
scientists at WIV are lying and hence why their notes require examination? I wouldn’t understand
why the lie (if this IS implied).
I guess my question would be, why the divide? Perhaps someone who is elbow deep in the eld
could break it down in layman’s terms?
Jonathan Latham

The short answer to Q1. Brenda is that the eld as a whole has multiple con icts of
interest: Patents, businesses, consultancies, NGOs, with the actual or potential 
pro tmakers; not to mention their own careers at stake. It takes a brave virologist to
speak out about this. Read “The River: a journey to the source of AIDS”. Here is a start: 
http://www.aidsorigins.com/covid-19-and-the-origins-of-aids-debate/
This should also answer Q2. Scientists are no more immune to con icts of interest

than any other sector of society. If Sars-CoV-2 were de nitively found to come from a
lab (engineered or not) questions would be asked about the validity of the prevailing
business model for pandemic detection/prevention etc.
Ron Brightmore
A very well written article. My main problem with it is one of balance. The arguments for lab origin
are strong but there is too little on the arguments for natural origin. The discussion of some of the
logic for natural causes gives the impression that this is the sum of the evidence, which is
potentially misleading. It is also interesting that the article denounces those who call the lab origin
concept conspiratorial but suggest conspiracy amongst those who defend the lab’s position. I think
this is a very important article as long as it is read as a through and logical analysis mainly of only
one side of the debate.
gwb
Many of the articles promoting the natural origin of Sars-CoV-2 are by authors whose
careers are based on laboratory/GOF research, and are not happy about the bright
light being shined on their eld. Chris Martenson has been doing a good series of
videos on the coronavirus since January, and has dissected a couple of recent papers
and statements, noting their lack of data and awed logic. Here are a couple:
https://www.peakprosperity.com/covid-19-a-result-of-lab-manipulation-suspicions-
grow/ (starting at about 18:35)
https://www.peakprosperity.com/coronavirus-are-our-scientists-lying-to-us/
(starting at about 21:20)
Faust
Excellent article! There is another small but interesting piece of the puzzle by Shi Zhengli and here 
collaborators at the WIV – seropositive studies around the Yunnan Caves and Southern China. They
were looking for evidence of zoonotic transfers in the local “high risk” populous.. What they found 
was evidence of low rates (2.7%)of seropositive for Bat Like SARS-CoV (BL-SARS-CoV) in Yunnan, and
non in southern China. 
But here is the kicker, they actually used a sample from Wuhan as a negative control (albiet small

sample size n=240, 1 positive) for BL-SARS-CoV in 2015 in the at risk populations. To spell it out, the
Shi Zhengli group demonstrated conclusively that there is no endemic BL-SARS-CoV in Wuhan as
of 2015.
It is true, that something could have changed since 2015., bats and BL-SARS-CoV could have
appeared spontaneously in Wuhan However, this is a strong piece of evidence that appears not to
be the case.
Geographical structure of bat SARS-related coronaviruses

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7106260/
Human-animal interactions and bat coronavirus spillover potential among rural residents in
Southern China
MERS also provides an excellent zoonotic transfer template. It has had many failed spillover events,
it is not adapted to Human-to-Human transmission, In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 appears to be far too
well adapted to have resulted from a wild spillover event. If it had, it would have been been causing
a mystery pneumonia for years prior to 2019, and we would have found evidence of it.
Full MERS review: What Have We Learned About Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus
Emergence in Humans? A Systematic Literature Review
Note the low R0, it is constantly infecting and burning itself out with an R0<1.
Another excellent resource is Wildlife and Emerging Zoonotic Diseases: The Biology, Circumstances
and Consequences of Cross-Species Transmission (Current Topics in Microbiology and … Topics in

Microbiology and Immunology) by James E. Childs https://preview.tinyurl.com/zoonoticbook
John Day
The authors said, “Given the simplicity and utility of this step this lack of transparency suggests that
there is something to hide. If so, it must be important. But then the question is: What?” But
Zheng_Li Shi has already did a preliminary examination of her lab’s records. She was relieved to nd

that none of the viruses studied can be directly related to the Sars-COV-2 virus. She also studied
records of her co-workers. China has also said that they will allow an investigation, but strictly

scienti c, and after the pandemic passes. If most people do not understand the intricate details of
virology, then why would the authors assume that the Chinese government is hiding something
which even they don’t understand? Can the authors address my points???


Jonathan Latham
I (JRL) am a virologist. I understand pretty well the “intricate details of virology”.First,
China should not set conditions on any investigation and has been contradictory in its
of cial statements. Second it has to be independent and it can hardly rely on the say-
so of Dr Shi, who would be the main subject of that investigation! Third, what does
that mean strictly scienti c? Fourth, it should happen quickly. The investigation issue
is discussed in more detail here well here: https://thebulletin.org/2020/06/did-the-sars-
cov-2-virus-arise-from-a-bat-coronavirus-research-program-in-a-chinese-laboratory-
very-possibly/
John Day
From saying that they refused an investigation and therefore have

something to hide, to this: “China should not set conditions on any
investigation”, and “can hardly rely on the say-so of Dr Shi”, “what does it
mean, strictly scienti c”, and “it should happen quickly”, show a large
backtracking on your part. Why not just be UNBIASED from the
beginning?
John Day
Shi Zheng-Li has already done a preliminary review of her records and the lab’s records. Of course
an investigation by international experts would be a good addition. China said that they would
agree to such an investigation, strictly scienti c, but after the pandemic.
Martin S.
Former MI6’s chief Sir Richard Dearlove claims that coronavirus was man-made in Chinese lab.
Downing St. calls it ‘fanciful’.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11788059/downing-street-mi6-chief-fanciful-claims-coronavirus- 
man-made-chinese-lab/
Podcast – https://art19.com/shows/planet-normal/episodes/f7b2af4f-9205-43bb-b3aa-a44891a45d2d

– interview starts around 10:30

Martin S.
At one point on June 7, Forbes had an article about this paper – that Norwegian
scientist Birger Sørensen has claimed the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is not natural
in origin – https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/norway-scientist-claims-
report-proves-coronavirus-was-lab-made .
The article is immediately deleted –
https://twitter.com/davidnikel/status/1269716475918589954
Now it is only in the Wayback Machine archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200607212952/https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2
020/06/07/norway-scientist-claims-report-proves-coronavirus-was-lab-
made/#54f09c937ccd
Jonathan Latham
Its here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/norway-scientist-
claims-report-proves-coronavirus-was-lab-made/#1be1a6cf121d
Martin S.
I get a “This page is no longer active” on that site. I could

send you a screenshot if you like. Maybe still active in other
countries??
Jonathan Latham
JUNE 9, 2020 AT 11:32 AM
It works for me but I have seen other people
complaining in other venues.



Frank Bish

Great article!
Peter Dietrich
Didn’t Dr Gao Fu, director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention say a couple of days
ago that the Wuhan market was not the origin of the coronavirus, but the victim of a super
spreading event? This would mean that a lab origin Is even more proabable, isn‘t it?
Jonathan Latham
He did:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1189506.shtml
and we didnt nd a clear veri cation link in time.

Thanks for the reminder.
Lifeguard Larry
Possibly an escape from a lab? Why not a genetically targeted bioweapon?

Think about it. China has suffered so much less than the rest of the world. How could that be?
Maybe they’re government responses were so much better than everyone else’s? Ridiculous on the
face of it.
Maybe they’ve hidden the true extent of their suffering? Hidden a million or more deaths?
Impossible….
….which means the Han possess much greater immunity than everyone else.
How could that be achieved? Well we know blood type and ACE receptors have different statistical
pro les among different racial groups. Probably a lot of other signi cant diffences are genetic as
well. What if the Chinese in their passaging experiments trained covid 19 using different blood types
and cells from different racial groups and noticed that the trained viruses were much more
damaging to certain groups than to others?


If there’s are truth to this the Chinese would have hidden all records of such experiments. It’s
surprising how much can be hidden with enough wealth and power. 
It’s also true that our lefties would not tolerate any explanation which does not lay principle blame
on Trump and his white supporters.

None of that really matters because people in labs everywhere will be trying to achieve the same
results. If they do the cat is out of the bag.

Toxic Reverend
What the world needs now is a

Biological Weapons Watchdog Group
My Opinion with reference material:
The Sunshine Project was the only real watchdog

group for biological weapons and biotechnology.
They suspended operations in Feb 2008 due to

“a lack of funding and donations”
#BioWeapons Archived At The Wayback Machine

https://web.archive.org/web/20080607171528/https://sunshine-project.org/
However;
Dead Scientists 2004-2011
Includes SOME of The Mysterious Deaths Of Numerous Microbiologists {aka Biological Weapons
Scientists}
https://www.stevequayle.com/index.php?s=146
>
>>>
>
Please consider the lyrics to the song

“Word Of Mouth” by Mike & The Mechanics
“Do you believe everything they’ve told you”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jbSwMU7H0w
With “THAT SAID” this ARCHIVED Wikipedia page does have a number of “External Links” that are
worth taking a look at.
ARCHIVED Wikipedia – Sunshine Project


https://web.archive.org/web/20190404032105/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Project

Lifeguard Larry 

https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/covid-19-virus-has-properties-that-have-never-been-
found-in-nature-before-304229
This is starting to look very, very ugly. The Chinese Communists have a lot to answer for.
Ben the Layman

I’m just a layman who got interested around May 1 when the “Five Eyes Dossier” story broke. Your
article is one of the best I’ve seen. Also the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists one. I spent many hours
reading and writing an essay but it doesn’t say anything not said better here or in the other articles.
The world needs an exhaustive investigation into the government-academic tie-ins to this asco.
Gilles Demaneuf
Excellent article.
It is worth adding that on the 20 April 2020, Yuan Zhiming, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s
Communist Party chief, hit back at those promoting theories that the virus had escaped from the
facility and caused the outbreak in the central Chinese city. “There is absolutely no way that the
virus originated from our institute,” Yuan said in an interview with the state-run China Global
Television Network.
The key word here is ‘our’…
In September 2019 Yuan Zhiming published a detailed paper in the Journal of Biosafety and
Biosecurity that listed many operational and nancial issues with Chinese labs.
Here are a few chosen quotes:
“[…] due to different investment sources, af liations, and management systems, the
implementation of these laboratories faces dif culties converging objectives and cooperation
work ows. This scenario puts laboratory biosafety at risk since the implementation ef ciency and
timely operations are relatively compromised.”
“[…] several high-level BSLs have insuf cient operational funds for routine yet vital processes. Due to

the limited resources, some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in
some cases none at all.”

“Currently, most laboratories lack specialized biosafety managers and engineers. In such facilities, 
some of the skilled staff is composed by part-time researchers. This makes it dif cult to identify and
mitigate potential safety hazards in facility and equipment operation early enough” 
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2588933819300391
No going back to basics:
What we know for sure is that (1) the outbreak started in Wuhan, (2) the market does not seem to
be the source, (3) there is no horseshoe bats colony in Hubei and (4) there were no bats sold at the
market.
This leaves us with a few possibilities:
a. Some bat to human transmission happened in Wuhan

b. Some animal (not bat) to human transmission happened in Wuhan.
c. Some bat to human transmission happened in South China (where the bat colonies are)
d. Some animal (not bat) to human transmission happened somewhere else than Wuhan
Let’s look at these:
a. Since there are no population of bats in Wuhan and none were sold at the market, what were the
bats doing there? How did they get there?
Clearly they must have been transported. If it was for food then the chance of these bats to go
infectious in Wuhan and only Wuhan is rather small – they are many other cities were you would
expect bats to be sold. The 1% of the article is a good estimate.
Hence most likely not transported for food. So most likely transported for lab work. And since
Wuhan is the Chinese were the lab work is concentrated, it would make sense.
b. Same argument as above. If the animals are transported for food, then why Wuhan of all Chinese
cities? The probability of such an event is small. So most likely not-for-food. Which means lab
animals. Likely animals collected close to South China bat caves.
c. If the bat-to-human transmission happened in South China, then why did the outbreak
happened in Wuhan only of all Chinese cities?
The probability of such an event is very small. The only thing that would select Wuhan as likely end
destination is again lab work. So that would be someone collecting bats getting infected at the
collection point.
d. Same argument as above. Why would again the infected human then pop up exclusively in
Wuhan of all Chinese cities? 
Most likely scenario: because the animals, rodent, whatever were part of a study in pathogenes –
where Wuhan was again having a leading role. 
Conclusion:
Whatever way you look at it, the fact that it happened in Wuhan and only in Wuhan – where there is

no bat population – points back to a collection, transport or lab accident.

Mike Dobbie
A tremendously well-researched article. It was published on 3 Jun but I have noticed that a number
of articles from Chinese researchers from March to May 2019 are already speaking about three bat
coronaviruses that exhibit naturally-occurring, but not the same, inserts on the s1/s2 spikes that are
the reason that Covid-19 binds so well on the ACE2 receptors on the human namely: RmYN01,
RmYN02 and the unknown and unproven RaTG13 (no existing specimens to check). They claim that
these correspond between 93% – 96% to the makeup of Covid-19 but much less on their ability to
infect humans. Is there anything you can add to this or is this a defensive mechanism from Chinese
researchers to justify the areas on which they feel vulnerable prior to more extensive research.
Rasaki
This preprint offers more support in favor of the lab escape hypothesis:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340924249_Is_considering_a_genetic-
manipulation_origin_for_SARS-CoV-2_a_conspiracy_theory_that_must_be_censored
Sam Peters
ummm very interesting, one question is tho if this was / came from a lab the reasons behind it
would be to crash the economy right ? So you crash it and then ”someone” takes control of this ? or
is it just a money thing
Mike B
Mr. Latham and Ms. Wilson wrote: ” The bigger question then is: what?” are they hiding.
Based on your other research, do you care to speculate?


Excellent article. Thank you!

Mike B 
Here’s one theory: https://toresays.com/2020/03/13/where-is-timothy-cunninghams-whistleblower- 

report-on-coronavirus/
Cunningham was a CDC worker who died from suicide a few years ago. I don’t have the science
background to call BS on this post but maybe Mr Latham or Ms Wilson or someone on this
comment list does.
Sam Bonacorsi
The world must determine how this virus started. If there is anything already known about its
disposition in the laboratory environment, those involved owe humanity a full accounting. There is
absolute nothing racist about investigating the WIV as a potential source of the virus. People who
are considering this possibility are not indicting Chinese as an ethnic group, but rather the
institutions possibly responsible for this calamity. The US government has its fair share of skeletons
in the closet, but even this doesn’t re ect fairly on the citizenry of the USA. Bad things happen in life
and we need learn from each lesson or face the risk of repeating the mistakes of others.
Kurt Thomas
Thank you for this interesting article. What about recent ndings that indicate occurrence of the
virus in Barcelona as early as March 2019? Would that con ict with your theory or in essence just put
an earlier date on the escape-from-lab?
“Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater anticipates the
occurrence of COVID-19 cases”

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1.full.pdf?
fbclid=IwAR1BPFUTovv5Kcl55oEY12mjVXkSXGW6NRFL7QBsYLfnHHnBxV9b-tY0-40
Jonathan Latham
The Barcelona data is quite an outlier. It seems very preliminary and contamination
has to be strongly suspected. The actual sequence of the virus that they found might
well answer the question. If true, it opens up several possibilities. I believe others in

other places have looked at older samples and I don’t know exactly what they found. A
key question would be whether this nding was special to Barcelona. 

Ken Meyercord 
Why is no consideration given to the possibility that the SARS-CofV-2 virus escaped from our own
demonstrably leaky USAMRIID lab at Ft. Detrick? For a discussion of that possibility, see
https://kiaskblog.wordpress.com/2020/05/04/the-virus-of-nationalism/ .
Colin Butler
Thank you for this. In 2012 I co-authored, with Peter Daszak and others, an editorial in EcoHealth
which in part was critical of gain of function studies (though we used different language) see
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10393-012-0768-4 . My recollection is that Peter was

originally resistant to the cautionary note I was able to introduce to that editorial. My priority was
the risk, Peter thought the bene ts were far more plausible and important. Eight years later I am
personally unaware of signi cant bene ts owing from such gain of function research, but even
more concerned about the risk. I thought COVID-19 could have been engineered very early (check
my twitter statements) because I was incredulous one so infectious to humans could have evolved
“naturally”. Like others, the protests of researchers like Peter Daszak and Jeremy Farrar (head of the
Wellcome Trust) left me sceptical – how could they “know” for sure it wasn’t engineered? Also, they
had clear con icts of interest – to maintain their entry to China and (perhaps) to protect their
Chinese collaborators from censure. I could be wrong, but at the very least the laboratory theory
remains plausible, and the reasoning that it must be “natural” is unconvincing to me.
Kurt Thomas
Thanks, Dr. Latham
William Connor
Great article- Explained the situation as a scientist, no politics.

Dr. Patricia Schellbach

JULY 2, 2020 AT 1:45 PM REPLY
Excellent article. Great research and a much better understanding of the probable origins of COVID- 
19.

Mike B
Mr. Butler, what is your twitter handle? I’d like to follow. Thank you for speaking up.
Lila Gebhart
This is one of the best articles I have read in a long time. Everything is clearly explained and even I
understand the information (I am not a scientist). Good job!
Timothy Stout
JULY 10, 2020 AT 5:32 AM REPLY
I personally did a lengthy analysis using references from over 100 journal articles. It appears that the
virus is man-made using Directed Evolution, the technology resulting in the 2018 Nobel Prize in
chemistry.
I published the analysis in a preprint article at http://www.osf.io/usx58 .
There are a number of issues. There are about half-a-dozen amino acids that differ in key locations
between the 2002 SARS virus and this one. These are the ones that attach the virus to the ACE2
receptor. However, there is strong selection pressure against any of these changes individually. With
all changing simultaneously, the backbone becomes more exible and the new shape makes it
more effective than that of SARS. Simultaneously, disparately located amino acids are very dif cult
to change with simultaneous mutations. This is trivial for directed evolution. A pangolin virus is held
up as having the same sequence as people. There is a problem here. Tests show that the static eld
of the backbone with these amino acid changes is different. This change prevents the normal
cleavage site of the spike from being effective. However, the new virus has is what is called a
polybasic cleavage site which does not appear in the earlier SARS virus. This addition overcomes the
static interference of the new backbone. In other words, without the polybasic cleavage site, the
new backbone can’t infect. The pangolin virus does not have one. This raises the question of
whether the pangolin virus genome as published is even capable causing an infection. For more
details, the article might be considered. 

Lifeguard Larry
JULY 11, 2020 AT 6:08 PM REPLY 
I noticed it purchasing a ticket to Wuhan. Rather peculiar, I thought

Patrick
Thank you so much for compiling and presenting your research in this paper. I was beginning to
feel alone in my search for truth and evidence of critical thinking. I understand the scope of this
presentation does not include the possibility of pernicious motive, but an independent
investigation should not dismiss the possibility of intentionality.
Ken Meyercord
Hear, hear, Patrick. Whom do you have in mind?
Ben
Every MD I ask has told me Covid-19 came from a Lab, they say the structure has too many
coincidences to be believed, one even used the analogy “if you blow up enough libraries eventually
one day in the resulting wreckage of one of them you will nd a perfect set of encyclopedias” if you
believe that then you might believe its a natural virus. I asked about intentions, they leaned toward
accident.
Mark
Has anyone seen an answer to this June 12 Business Insider piece claiming that the virus could not
have been man-made? https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-lab-manmade-myth-
debunked-2020-6?r=US&IR=T
Following is a transcript of the video.
Narrator: COVID-19 myths have spread just about as quickly as the disease itself, but one myth in
particular just won’t go away: that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, isn’t naturally

occurring and was actually manmade. In fact, one substantial survey found that almost 30% of
Americans believe that this virus came from a lab.


But scientists believe that they can con dently say that the virus wasn’t created by humans and the
myth going around is nothing more than that, a myth. So how do they know with such certainty? 
The key is in the virus’s genetic code. This is the genomic sequence for SARS-CoV-2.

It was decoded in January 2020, just weeks after the world started to learn of this novel coronavirus.
Each of those letters is a genetic building block known as a nucleotide, and when built up, they
form an organism’s genetic code, which we can use to understand them. Each organism has a
different code and a varying amount of nucleotides. A human has about three billion of them,
whereas a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2 has about 30,000. Your genetic sequence can give information
about your hair, eye color, sex, and lineage. And just like your genes give clues about who and where
you come from, scientists can use a virus genome sequence to help explain where that virus
originated as well. An ancestry test for viruses, if you will.
Robert Garry: We honed in on the parts of the virus that we thought were unique and that might
play a role in the evolution of the virus, but also in the pathogenesis of it. And a couple of things
stood out pretty quickly when we starting to compare with the other coronaviruses that have come
before.
Narrator: That’s Robert Garry, a professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Tulane University.
Along with his colleagues, he used the virus sequence to try and understand where SARS-CoV-2
came from. They rst looked at the virus’s backbone. That’s the whole genomic structure, unique to
each virus, like a viral template. Simpli ed, the backbone for SARS-CoV-2 and its 30,000 nucleotides
looks a little bit like this.
Each section is responsible for a part of the virus. For example, this one is responsible for the spike
proteins you may have seen lining the virus shell. So it may not come as a surprise that to engineer
a virus in a lab, you would need to start with a backbone. But to manufacture from scratch the
backbone of a virus that can also cause disease is almost impossible.
Garry: I mean, people just don’t know enough about what makes a virus pathogenic to be able to
assemble that. How you pick amongst all the possibilities to get to that last little bit that’s gonna
turn it into this worldwide pathogen, which sequences do you think about to put in there?
Narrator: Simply, there is just not enough knowledge about how to make a new virus that would
also cause signi cant devastation, like SARS-CoV-2 has. So creating a new, deadly backbone is
pretty much impossible. But there is another way the novel coronavirus could have been created in
a lab, and that would be using an existing virus backbone or genetic sequence as a starting point.
With a recycled backbone, two main methods could have been used to create the new virus. They
could’ve either quickly mutated it, or added and deleted parts of the existing virus. But additions
and deletions in a virus leave a trace that can be pointed out pretty quickly, a little bit like removing 
a red brick from a wall and replacing it with a black brick. This is exactly what Maciej Boni, an
associate professor at Penn State, looked for. 
Maciej Boni: You might see an insertion that looks unusual, and you look out in nature and you see
that no other viruses have genetic insertions like that. We did not see any genetic insertions that

are not also identi ed in nature. So there’s no evidence suggesting that it was manmade or
laboratory created somehow. 

Narrator: So what if they went with the other option and mutated an existing virus? This is known as
serial passage and acts in a similar way to selective breeding. Scientists are able to mimic evolution,
to a degree. By forcing the virus to mutate over and over again into a potentially different form. This
can be used to weaken a virus, which is how some vaccines have been made, or to strengthen a
virus, say, by making it more transmissible.
But for this to work, the existing virus would have to show signi cant genetic similarity to the new
virus. In fact, they would have to be almost identical. Because this process only speeds up viral
evolution and has a limit, it’s not possible to direct mutations into a completely different form. Yet
Garry and his team found that the backbone for SARS-CoV-2 was strictly unique, differing
signi cantly from other coronaviruses.
For example, SARS-CoV, the rst SARS, has only about a 79% genetic sequence match to SARS-CoV-
2. So it’s ruled out. The best candidate is RaTG13, a bat coronavirus with a 96% gene sequence
similarity.
Garry: Now, 96% sounds pretty close, but in genetic terms, that’s actually a pretty long ways away.
Narrator: To put it in perspective, humans and chimpanzees share 99% of the same genome. And
you may have noticed there’s still a large difference between the two. For SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13,
that 4% is the difference of about 800 nucleotides, or about 50 years of natural evolution.
Garry: 800 is too big a barrier. You have something that was 99.5% or 99.7% similar, maybe only 20 or
30 nucleotides, you might get away with it, you might be able to manufacture that, doing it in the
lab.
Narrator: But it just wouldn’t be possible with current knowledge and existing viruses. There’s also
another part of the gene sequence that helped Garry and his colleagues learn about the natural
origins of SARS CoV-2. In particular, this set of nucleotides in the gene sequence. You might
remember those from earlier. They’re responsible for the virus spike proteins, the pointy, claw-like
arms lining the outside of the virus that give it its distinctive appearance, and coronaviruses their
name.
Speci c viruses, including coronaviruses, use these arms to enter and take over host cells. But this
piece of the spike protein helped tell the researchers that this virus originated in nature. This set of
nucleotides relates to the receptor binding domain, or RBD. That’s the part that latches on to the
receptors on targeted cells. As viruses can only survive when inside other cells, this is a vital section 
that you would have to focus on if you were to make a virus in a lab. Garry and his team found the
RBD has evolved speci cally to bind to the human cell ACE2, a receptor usually used to help 
regulate blood pressure.

But it’s the way it so successfully binds to the ACE2 receptor that is crucial. You see, when a scientist
tests what aspects would make a virus more potent, they run models through computer

simulations. But when researchers put this sequence through those simulations, they found that
SARS-CoV-2’s RBD shouldn’t be successful at all and would actually cause poor ef ciency in
transmission, which we know is not the case.
Garry: Yeah, by working in the lab or working with the computer, trying to gure it out, we just
would not have come up with this particular way to have this virus bind to this receptor, a very
important part of the whole replication process.
Narrator: In other words, if your goal was to make a virus to infect humans, you wouldn’t have
chosen this one.
Garry: Basically, what nature has done is come up with a solution for binding that is better than any
computer and also way better than what any scientist could come up with.
Narrator: So we know why scientists con dently say SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t made in a lab, but that’s not
the end of the story. It’s also been rumored that SARS-CoV-2 was a known virus that was
accidentally leaked from a lab. Now, we can’t say for certain this isn’t the case, but it’s highly
unlikely. For one, this virus wasn’t sequenced before January 2020. And if it was, the world would
know because the Wuhan Institute of Virology was speci cally looking for something like this in
order to protect the world from any outbreaks.
Garry: If they would have come up with a SARS coronavirus that was 76% similar to the original
SARS one. I mean, they would have published that as fast as they could. That would have been, at
least in the scienti c world, very big news.
Narrator: But it’s also just statistically highly unlikely.
Garry: So just out in nature there, literally billions of people that are having millions of encounters
with these animals. And, you know, we’re talking about a handful, a few dozen, maybe, in the whole
world are scientists that go out and trap bats. So just on the odds of the thing, it’s just a minuscule
chance that it was this one scientist that accidentally infected himself in this very sophisticated
laboratory setting.
Narrator: So SARS-CoV-2’s origin is no longer a mystery. But where and how it jumped in nature,
well, that’s a question many are still trying to answer.

Jonathan Latham
JULY 15, 2020 AT 1:41 PM REPLY 
A fair bit wrong here but you cannot compare 99% difference of a mammal (chimp vs
humans) with 99% between two viruses that mutate millions of times faster.


Richard
Jonathan and Allison, This is the most comprehensive tracking of the details and well researched
and cited thank you for your work. Proper journalism still exists. As for your concluding paragraph
I’ve been asking myself the same question since realising that they were using this justi cation for
the research. It occurs to me that the justi cation is a white-wash for underlying other reasons for
the research.
Colin Butler
To Mike B, my twitter handle is @ColinDavdButler
Jonathan Latham
People subscribing to comments might want to see our new article:

A Proposed Origin for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-
covid-19-pandemic/
Timothy Stout
To Mark, responding to a few comments above. Garry’s article is available free at
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 .
About half-a-dozen comments above yours, I mentioned an article I posted in preprint at

https://osf.i0/us58 .
This article is actually a rebuttal to Garry’s article. If you read his in the light of my analysis I believe
you will be disappointed in the quality of argument he presented.

John Pena

Any book coming out about this “Conspiracy”

John Pena

Norwegian and British vaccine scientists have published unequivocal evidence that SARS-CoV-2,
the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is man-made.
The authors state two conclusions: (1) the mutations that would normally be seen in the course of
animal to human transmission have not occurred in SARS-CoV-2, indicating that it was fully “pre-
adapted” for human infection and (2) SARS-CoV-2 has insertions in its protein sequence that have
never been detected in nature and contribute to its infectivity and pathogenicity.
Samuel
AUGUST 15, 2020 AT 2:28 PM REPLY
Thanks! Very intriguing article with solid scienti c reasoning. I am Chinese currently in China and
can provide my own account here:
Right around Chinese new year time, before the internet was heavily censored by Chinese
government, there was a lot anger toward government oppression against Wuhan whistle-blower
doctors, and there were some quite credible “rumors” circulating among wechat friend circles,
among which there was a particularly interesting one that got my attention and I actually did some
research.
It was believed that the staff member who carried the virus was a young female graduate
researcher Yanling Huang, and she died from the infection and was deemed patient zero back
then. I checked the WIV website and found Yanling Huang’s introduction page was removed, but
some traces of her such as class enrollment list can still be found by doing a search on the website.
Later on the Chinese of cial TV claimed that “Yanling Huang” graduated from WIV several years
ago and is now working happily as a researcher in a pharmceutic start-up, and her boss showed up
to say that she was well and happy. However, Yalin Huang herself never showed up or spoke in
public, odd, huh?
Samuel
AUGUST 15, 2020 AT 4:11 PM REPLY
note the quote here “And if it was, the world would know because the Wuhan Institute of Virology
was speci cally looking for something like this in order to protect the world from any outbreaks.”. To

me this is a clear indication that the interview was a paid program by CCP, I am sure even most of
Chinese like me will not believe that WIV’s motive is to “protect tthe world from any outbreaks”.

Most of Chinese know that the director of WIV is a young wife of an big shot in Chinese academia
circle, and many have openly questioned her quali cations… 
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9/2/2020 The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin

BIOTECHNOLOGY, COMMENTARIES, HEALTH JUNE 2, 2020

The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had

Facebook 9.8K Twitter More 1K

By Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

transitioned to humans via intermediate animals (civets and dromedaries respectively),

virus Shi Zheng-Li releases a bat 

political football; either an opportunity for Sinophobia or a partisan “blame game “.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently constructing a new and expanded

its lab at 70%.

associated with the proposed NBAF in Manhattan, Kansas.”

significantly in disease surveillance and collection of viruses from wild animal

Historical lab releases, a brief history

laboratories, including four in China. These outbreaks caused 13 individual infections

efforts, it is a matter of vital international importance to establish whether the 

The COVID-19 Wuhan lab escape thesis

Scienti c assessments of the lab escape theory

search to find its origins.”

or animal host intermediaries, either in the form of a confirmed animal host or a

they have come from our lab?”

Was Sars-CoV-2 created in a lab?

an altered virus that escaped.

Passaging, GOF research, and lab escapes

situation, creates a new pathogen.

2013 ; Ge et al., 2016 ; Hu et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018 ).

engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor (Ge et al., 2013).

research on bat coronaviruses (Menachery et al., 2015 ).

cells containing human or monkey ACE2 receptors.

recent such grant proposed that:

either through genetic engineering or passaging, or both.

How do viruses escape from high security laboratories?

the building (Weiss et al., 2015 ).

still need to be learned (Weiss et al., 2015).

The safety record of the WIV

The leading hypothesis is a lab outbreak

As alluded to above, Daszak is the named principal investigator on multiple US grants

An investigation is needed, but who will do it?

every major institution in the global public health community is implicated.

having knowingly made an Actual Pandemic Pathogen.

systematic review and meta-regression to guide reporting of outcomes during disease

Furmanski, M. (2014). Laboratory Escapes and “Self-fulfilling prophecy” Epidemics.

receptor. Nature, 503(7477), 535-538.

pandemic pathogen. Frontiers in public health, 2, 116. 

natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses. Science, 310(5748), 676-679.

Lipsitch, M. (2018). Why Do Exceptionally Dangerous Gain-of-Function Experiments in

… & Randell, S. H. (2015). A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows

PLoS Pathog, 3(1), e5.

novel coronavirus from Wuhan: an analysis based on decade-long structural studies of

Wertheim, J. O. (2010). The re-emergence of H1N1 influenza virus in 1977: a cautionary

one, 5(6), e11184.

Zimmer, S. M., & Burke, D. S. (2009). Historical perspective—emergence of influenza A

Facebook Twitter More 10.8K

Very interesting and compelling work.

nerdhaspower has a related blog post – https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-

(published end of May)

about these issues.

The labels “Group A” and “Group B” match too. I suspect

raise, hopefully a detailed investigation will follow from this.

received. WIV continued to be funded for GOF during the ban.

have been broken.

2009-2010 Swine Flu killed 3k?

These authors work for the Obama admin.?