2021-06-25 16:46:12
This is a must-read article on the lab leak theory (it's more than a hypothesis now): https://web.archive.org/web/20210625105610/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.html
"About a week after the lockdown, Chinese scientists published a paper in The Lancet medical journal that identified bats as the likely source of the virus. The authors noted that the outbreak happened during local bat hibernation season and “no bats were sold or found at the Huanan seafood market,” so they reasoned that it may have been transmitted by an intermediary animal."
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"Social media users in China were among the first to be more skeptical. Did the spread of a disease from bats just happen to start in Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of the few top bat coronavirus research facilities in the world? And what about the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also carries out bat research, a few hundred yards from the seafood market?"
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"...a genomic database maintained by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with information about thousands of bat samples and at least 500 recently discovered bat coronaviruses, went offline in September 2019. The official explanation — that it was taken offline because it had been subjected to hacking — doesn’t explain why it was never securely shared some other way with responsible independent researchers."
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"...a Chinese state-TV story about Dr. Shi’s studies showed researchers handling bats or bat feces with their bare hands or with exposed arms. A person on her team likened a bat bite to “being jabbed with a needle.”"
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"The Wuhan C.D.C. also reportedly conducts research on bat-borne viruses.
One of its staff members, Tian Junhua, has developed a reputation for adventurous scientific discovery. A 2013 paper notes his team caught 155 bats in Hubei Province. The Washington Post reported that in a video released on Dec. 10, 2019, he boasted about “having visited dozens of bat caves and studied 300 types of virus vectors.” Previously, he also talked about having made mistakes in the field, like forgetting personal protective equipment and being splashed with bat urine or accidentally getting bat blood on his skin, according to The Post. And yet the World Health Organization reported that the agency denied ever storing or working with bat viruses in the lab before the pandemic."
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"A lot of attention has been drawn to an unusual feature on its spike protein called a furin cleavage site, with which the virus can better infect a human cell. It’s one of several odd features of SARS-CoV-2 that are weird enough that even virologists who greatly doubt lab involvement told me they were shocked to see it. In fact, even beyond the furin cleavage site, SARS-CoV-2 was a virus that scientists had never seen before."
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"In 2016 the Wuhan institute reported experimenting on a live bat coronavirus that could infect human cells in a BSL-2 lab — a biosafety level that has been compared with that of a dentist’s office."
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"Both the early reports from Chinese scientists and the more recent W.H.O. investigation this winter found many of the early cases had no connection to the seafood market, including the earliest acknowledged case so far, on Dec. 8, 2019."
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"from 2015 to 2019, there were more than 450 reported accidents with pathogens"
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"After a lab accident with anthrax bacteria in the Soviet Union in 1979 that killed dozens, leading Western scientists accepted the Soviet government’s excuses, which all turned out to be lies."
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