I wanted to call attention to this piece by Paul D. Thacker at RealClearInvestigations. In the piece Mr. Thacker explores researcher Paul Baric’s loss of NIH grants, suspension, and an alleged cover-up surrounding his role in the development of SARS-CoV-2. Here’s a snippet:
Since the pandemic’s outbreak six years ago, a slew of emails and documents released by Congress and through public records requests cast a dark shadow on the NIH and the virologists it funded, with nearly two-thirds of Americans now believing the virus came from a laboratory in China. Although the question of whether the virus that causes COVID-19 originated in a lab or in the wild is still a subject of debate, there is no doubt that scientists at the highest level worked to dismiss the lab-leak theory and shut down their connections to the work in Wuhan. Efforts by Collins and Fauci to delegitimize dissenting voices have been reported, but the central role played by Baric has been obscured. The UNC researcher’s work on coronaviruses and his connection to the Wuhan lab are now receiving renewed attention after RealClearInvestigations learned that the federal government has quietly removed Baric from all his NIH grants. RCI has also learned that UNC placed Baric on leave. UNC has also refused to cooperate with NIH officials as they have attempted to gather more facts and emails about Baric’s coronavirus research, which evidence leads them to believe led to the coronavirus pandemic.
I don’t see that this reveals as much as its author seems to think it does. There is a sizeable gap between being interested in gain-of-function and novel coronaviruses and actually developing them. The article relies heavily on stacking implications: each individually ambiguous fact is presented in a way that encourages the reader to infer a conclusion that none of the facts independently establish.
As I see it the case Mr. Thacker builds would be dismissed in criminal court since it doesn’t meet the standard of “guilty beyond reasonable doubt” and, while it might survive early dismissal in a civil case where the standard is “preponderance of the evidence”, whether that case would be decided in favor of the plaintiffs remains to be seen. While the article strengthens the case that a lab origin was prematurely and self-interestedly stigmatized and that U.S.-funded coronavirus research deserves much more scrutiny, it does not prove that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered or that Dr. Baric, UNC, EcoHealth, or WIV created the pandemic virus.
I continue to believe as I have for some time that we do not know the origins of the virus and the sole prospective way of identifying it for sure is in the discovery phase of a civil suit if such a thing were allowed to go through, a very long shot.
At present, the majority of evidence favors zoonotic origins. We are unlikely to resolve this soon as China will not allow anyone into their lab and it took us over a decade to find the origins of the AIDS virus. As a point of clarification, everything I have read on the efforts of people trying to actively discredit the lab leak theory was actually people trying to discredit the idea that it was deliberately developed as a bioweapon against the US. There was a lot of disagreement about the lab leak theory and people wrote about why they disagreed but that’s different from trying to suppress the idea.
Steve
There are three possible sources of the COVID-19 virus:
1) Man-made virus from gain of function research.
2) Natural virus escaped from Wuhan Lab from COVID research of bat samples.
3) Natural spillover.
From my perspective, the man-made version is most likely due to the presence of the furin cleavage site. I would put the likelihood over 70%. The second most likely is that a natural virus being studied in the lab escaped. I would put these odds around 25%. The least likely is natural spillover. I would put the odds less than 5%.
From a legal perspective, that is not enough to convict someone of creating a deadly virus. Unless there is clear evidence of a cover-up, it will be hard to convict.