Pat Fidopiastis
Pat Fidopiastis is a Professor of Microbiology at California Polytechnic State University.
Arguments against the SARS-CoV-2 ‘lab-leak hypothesis’ follow the same obfuscation playbook that Johnny Cochran used to turn a pile of damning evidence against OJ Simpson into an acquittal. Johnny’s courtroom performance was a masterclass in how to use emotion and misrepresentation of science to convince people that racially diverse police officers arrived at the murder scene at different times and spontaneously conspired to plant evidence to take down OJ.
It’s even more shocking that scientists and politicians with everything to lose from a lab leak could convince anyone there’s no need to ask questions about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. An unnaturally human-adapted coronavirus erupted from this one particular market (out of tens of thousands in China) that happened to be a few miles from a lab that was constructing human-adapted coronaviruses, so shut up! Not surprisingly, over time most people stopped believing Johnny Cochran’s bluster. Thankfully, as censorship around the lab leak relented and evidence spread, the vast majority of people (including the FBI) now believe the pandemic started in a lab.
An LA Times column, whose author also believes unvaccinated people deserve to die, took a shot at shutting down SARS-CoV-2 origin debate, stating: 1) public health officials and their institutions have been harmed by “skewed public opinion,” 2) no one can support lab leak without positing a “vast conspiracy,” 3) validating lab leak requires evidence that Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) scientists were working on a SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus, and 4) there’s no evidence for lab leak.
Dr Fauci, his boss (Dr Collins), and their devotees, declared lab leak a “destructive conspiracy” at the beginning of the pandemic, causing “great potential harm to the science community and international harmony,” before enough evidence was available to make an assessment one way or the other. Therefore, any alleged harm done to these public health officials was self-inflicted and entirely the result of their desire to coerce their views onto everyone else. Furthermore, supporting lab leak does not require a conspiracy.
For starters, the far less transmissible SARS-CoV-1 leaked from labs in three countries in the early 2000s. Additionally, we know from a 2018 DARPA proposal that US and WIV researchers had been isolating (and genetically modifying) bat coronaviruses and testing their infectivity in humanized model systems as a basis for designing preemptive vaccines against hypothetical spillovers. The authors outlined plans to make chimeric bat coronaviruses a major part of their preemptive vaccine development workflow.
Simple logic, not conspiracy, is all one needs to connect the preliminary work they conducted in Wuhan to justify that multi-million-dollar proposal and a wild-fire pandemic caused by an unnaturally human-adapted coronavirus. Dr Fauci himself said, “You don’t want to go to Hoboken, NJ or Fairfax, VA to be studying the bat-human interface that might lead to an outbreak, so you go to China.”
It’s telling that EcoHealth Alliance and their allies went to great lengths to deny their dangerous “gain-of-function” research program ever existed, including making up their own definition of the term. According to a communication between an EcoHealth spokesperson and Brownstone Institute: “Because the SARS-related research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV dealt with bat coronaviruses that had never been shown to infect people, let alone cause significant mortality in humans, by definition it was not gain of function research.”
Translation: EcoHealth’s research program (outlined in the DARPA proposal), in which they were converting non-human-adapted bat viruses into human-adapted viruses, was not “gain-of-function.” It’s only “gain-of-function” if they had been converting human-adapted viruses into viruses that are even more human-adapted. Got that?
It’s convenient to dismiss lab leak evidence because there’s currently no proof that WIV scientists were working on a precursor virus. We know that the Chinese government removed its virus genome database from the NIH server at the start of the pandemic and continues to withhold evidence from scrutiny. Allegedly, China feared rogues would plant incriminating evidence; it’s equally likely they didn’t anticipate a lab accident and then pulled the database to prevent curious scientists from forensically deducing the unnatural origin of SARS-CoV-2.
Either way, why would China bother to push the narrative that the US Army started the pandemic if they were confident the virus came from the market? We also know that Dr Zhou Yusen, a senior WIV scientist working on a vaccine in the earliest days of the pandemic, “died mysteriously” not long after applying for a Covid-19 vaccine patent.
Apparently, he “fell off the roof” of the WIV. Another senior scientist who might have provided useful information was locked out of his lab early in the pandemic. Unfortunate “coincidences” such as these no doubt hampered our ability to collect relevant data on viruses worked on at the WIV. Taken together, the suspicious events in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic leave plenty of room for reasonable people to debate without concocting conspiracies, as authors from the LA Times and once respectable journals claim.
The easiest tactic to dismiss lab leak without debate is to claim there is no evidence. In fact, the evidence is strong, especially in the context of all the suspicious behavior of the prime suspects. See Fig 1 and Table 1 to visualize just how much of a unicorn SARS-CoV-2 is among its closest relatives. Meanwhile, the anti-lab leak crowd was happy to implicate raccoon dogs as the natural source of SARS-CoV-2. Their evidence was that traces of virus were found (several weeks after the start of the pandemic) in stalls at the Wuhan market that allegedly held these animals. They were so giddy to report this that they conveniently omitted that traces of the virus were also found in stalls containing “aquatic animals,” seafood, and vegetables.
Not surprisingly, efforts to isolate a wild ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, even from wild animals around Wuhan, have failed. Clearly, it’s easier to spin refutable yarns about unnaturally human-adapted “A” and “B” lineages of SARS-CoV-2 emerging from the market than it is to go out into nature and swab enough raccoon dogs to produce even a shred of hard evidence that there’s a natural animal version of the virus.
In order to ‘follow the science,’ the anti-lab-leak crowd requires everyone to believe that scientists routinely fall off roofs and that totalitarian regimes never lie or withhold information. We then have to take their word that SARS-CoV-2, a chimera consisting of a bat virus backbone with pangolin virus receptors containing a vital furin cleavage site apparently derived from human cells or possibly a cat coronavirus, spontaneously erupted into the world at one particular market near a lab that we know was making chimeric coronaviruses. This Frankenstein’s monster virus emerged only in Wuhan and nowhere else along the vast supply chain of doomed animals being transported to the tens of thousands of markets in China.
The LA Times article written by the guy who wants the unvaccinated to die warned us that misinformation and disinformation about lab leak has been weaponized by “sociopaths seeking financial or partisan gain.” We’re also bigots.
This begs a couple of questions: Which side was censored at the behest of the Federal Government by social media platforms during the pandemic? Which side would a ban on “gain-of-function” research hurt the most? The answers to these questions are obvious to anyone paying attention. Sadly, the narrative perpetrated to shut down virus-origin discussion makes even a master storyteller like Johnny Cochran seem like an amateur.
This article was originally published by the Brownstone Institute.
