Several Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives have called on Secretary of State Blinken to declassify official documents showing whether the New Coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory. Meanwhile, a classified study released last year by the U.S. Department of Energy research agency suggests that the new coronavirus may have originated in a Chinese laboratory and leaked from there leading to the pandemic.
While the World Health Organization released an investigation into the source of the new coronavirus in late March, trying to explain how the virus spread to humans, including through intermediate animal hosts and refrigerated food, and the claim that the leak from the lab was “highly improbable,” the WHO report raised more questions and discussion.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, along with two other Republican members of the committee, delivered a letter to Secretary of State Blinken on Thursday (May 6) seeking a State Department assessment of the Chinese military’s “secret program” at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research. The letter seeks the State Department’s assessment of the records of the Chinese military’s “secret program” at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research. The Wuhan Institute is located near the first case of a new coronavirus in late 2019.
Classified U.S. Department of Energy Report Shows Virus May Have Originated in Chinese Lab
On Monday (May 3), the Sinclair Broadcasting Group released an exclusive report on the intelligence division of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, a biodefense institute of the U.S. Department of Energy. “(Z Division) released a “classified” report on May 27, 2020.
Researchers in the division evaluated both possibilities for the origin of the pandemic: laboratory leakage and zoonotic natural evolution, and concluded that the new coronavirus may have originated in a laboratory in China.
According to Nasdaq, Sinclair Broadcast Group is the second largest television station operator in the United States, with 607 channels, 154 of which are affiliated with four national broadcasters: Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC. the group is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Sinclair report said an email from a Livermore Lab spokesman to Sinclair Broadcast Group confirmed the existence of the report, but declined to provide more information, citing the report’s classified status.
A former senior State Department official, who asked not to be named, confirmed to VOA that he had seen the report in September and October of last year and was under the impression that “the report’s conclusions were positive,” but declined to give specifics. The former official noted that “from the very beginning of the new crown outbreak, many departments of the U.S. government have conducted similar investigations based on their functions.”
The State Department issued a written statement (Fact Sheet) on Jan. 15, 2021, just as a WHO investigation team to China was about to arrive. Then-Secretary of State Pompeo said that in order to assist the important work of the WHO investigation team, the U.S. government was willing to share “new information about activities within the Chinese government’s laboratories in 2019.”
The State Department statement noted that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute for Virus Research became ill in the fall of 2019 with symptoms consistent with the new coronavirus, and that the Chinese Communist Party prevented independent journalists, researchers and world health agencies from interviewing Wuhan Institute for Virus Research personnel, including those who became ill.
The statement also noted that the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research did not stop its research on RaTG13, a bat coronavirus with 96.2 percent similarity to the new coronavirus, until the outbreak; the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research also published a study on so-called “gain-of-function” (gain-of-function) aimed at improving the virus’ ability to spread in humans. The Wuhan Institute of Virus Research also published a study on so-called “gain-of-function” (gain-of-function) aimed at improving the virus’ ability to spread in humans. The written statement noted that the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research has been working on classified projects, including laboratory animals, on behalf of the Chinese military since 2017.
Sinclair quoted experts as saying that “scientific activity in this area has a dual function (dual-use), both to support the expansion of new vaccines and for the development of biochemical weapons programs.”
In a March interview with Voice of America, Yu Maochun, former China policy adviser to Secretary Pompeo, noted that the Chinese military announced its research into biological weapons programs at the International Conference on Biological and Chemical Weapons in 2011, and that in 2015 the Chinese military published a book “dedicated to the study of man-made viruses as biological and chemical weapons.”
DOE report breaks down lab leak theory into two possibilities
Sinclair’s report says, “The ‘functional acquisition’ study, which has a dual function, divides the lab leak theory into two main schools of thought, both of which believe the new coronavirus was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, but one attributes this to a medical research accident, while the other believes it started with banned biological weapons research.”
Dr. David J. Rakestraw, a senior scientific adviser to Livermore National Laboratory’s biodefense program, has been coordinating the lab’s technical response to the new coronavirus.
Sinclair’s report quotes Rakestraw as saying, “He tends to define the outbreak in the context of ‘functional acquisition’ research (of bat coronavirus) in China.” “Functional acquisition” is one of the main projects studied by Shi Zhengli, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Probably the toughest job I’m working on is to be able to respond quickly to biological threats that emerge.” Lakestraw said in an interview with Caleb Cheung, director of the Quest Science Center. “We are concerned not only about the possibility of natural events occurring, such as the latest new coronavirus, but also about the possibility of enemies using developments in biotechnology to create new types of threats against which we have no vaccine.”
The new coronavirus pandemic that has killed millions of people worldwide began in January 2020 in Wuhan, China, and subsequently spread worldwide. There are two main hypothetical theories for the origin of the pandemic, the zoonotic natural evolution from animals to humans theory, and the accidental laboratory escape theory.
The U.S. intelligence community has indicated that they are conducting investigations and studies on both theories. The Chinese government and the World Health Organization promote the zoonotic theory that some animal, a bat or pangolin, transmitted the new coronavirus to humans, causing the pandemic, but so far no evidence has been found to support this claim. A WHO investigation in China concluded that “laboratory escape is highly unlikely.
Latham: If the outbreak originated in a lab, academics who repeatedly deny it need to suffer the consequences
“It is not surprising that U.S. government agencies are conducting research and reaching their own independent conclusions about the possible source of the new coronavirus.” Virologist Jonathan Latham, founder of the New York-based nonprofit science organization Bioscience Resource Project and editor-in-chief of the Independent Science News website, had this to say about Sinclair’s exclusive report in an email to Voice of America.
“Again, it would not be surprising if these conclusions differed significantly from those of academia, because if the outbreak originated in the laboratory – which seems likely at this point – academia could suffer the consequences. ” Latham said.
On February 19, 2020, the prestigious international medical journal The Lancet published a statement from 27 public health scientists, “We stand united in strongly condemning conspiracy theories that suggest that the new coronavirus is not of natural origin.”
On March 17, 2020, Nature Medicine published an article by Kristian G. Andersen and five other virologists, “Our analysis clearly shows that the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was not constructed in the laboratory and is not a fox-suspected manipulated virus. “
The open letter, published in The Lancet on Feb. 15, 2021, found by U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit public health investigative research organization, was organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.
In April 2020, the Trump administration’s National Institutes of Health halted funding for the EcoHealth Alliance, which had been in place since 2014. This decision was protested by 77 Nobel laureates.
And Dr. Dasak’s EcoHealth Alliance has been using this funding in part for 15 years for coronavirus research with Zhengli Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research.
Dr. Dasak was also a member of the UN World Health Organization-China Mission to Investigate the Source of New Coronaviruses. “I’m very aware of this (Shi Zhengli’s) lab,” he told CNN in Wuhan in February. “It’s a very good virus lab that is doing very good work that is close to finding the next coronavirus associated with Sars.”
Dr. Dasak added that their analysis clearly shows that “the new coronavirus is not a laboratory construct or an intentionally manipulated virus.”
“One of the hallmarks of good scientists is that they do their best to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know.” Nicholas Wade, a former science writer and reporter for The New York Times, wrote on May 4. “By that standard, the signatories of the Lancet letter behaved like poor scientists: they assured the public of facts they could not be sure were true.”
Wade said that both Sass and Mers viruses, which preceded the new coronavirus, left rich traces in the human infectious environment, finding their intermediate host species or hosts four and nine months after the outbreak, respectively.
“However, in what has been a potentially intensive search since the start of the new coronavirus pandemic some 15 months ago, Chinese researchers have failed to find the original bat population, or any intermediate species that the new coronavirus might have jumped in with, or any serological evidence that Chinese people, including those from Wuhan, had been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. ” Wade wrote.
Thus Wade argues that “the natural occurrence of the virus remains speculative, and while it may seem plausible at first, there has not been the slightest supporting evidence for more than a year.” He argues that “as long as this remains the case, serious attention should be paid to the alternative hypothesis that the new coronavirus has escaped from the laboratory.”
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