China, Fauci roles in pandemic’s origins can't be ignored

FPI / May 10, 2021

As evidence builds that the Chinese Institute of Virology in Wuhan is the most likely source of Covid-19, officials and scientists are even investigating if an Anthony Fauci-funded experiment is responsible for the pandemic that has caused immeasurable pain and suffering throughout the world for the past 15 months.

In report published this week by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nicholas Wade argues that the Chinese lab is the most likely source of the coronavirus.

Wade wrote: "The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped... it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence."

As Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman noted, Wade can't be easily dismissed by the Left as a Covid "conspiracy theorist."

Atomic Scientists noted that Wade is a science writer, editor, and author who has worked on the staff of Nature, Science, and, for many years, The New York Times.

"Left-leaning journalists who don’t like where this story is going may struggle to dismiss the author given his establishment credentials," Freeman wrote.

In the report, Wade describes a key Chinese researcher whose work received support from Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID): "Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or 'Bat Lady,' mounted frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses...

"It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. 'It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,' says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety."

On Thursday, Washington Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and two GOP colleagues on the committee wrote to Team Biden's Secretary of State Antony Blinken to “request that the U.S. Department of State release unclassified documents and declassify other documents for public release, as appropriate, related to the assertion in the Department’s January 15, 2021 Fact Sheet that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China collaborated with the Chinese military in conducting classified research, including laboratory animal experiments.”

Independent media have been reporting since the outbreak of Covid last January that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan laboratory linked to the Chinese communist government’s covert biological weapons program.

Related: Seafood? New Wuhan animal virus said tied to China’s bio-warfare program, January 28, 2020

In a December 2020 analysis for the Hoover Institution, Gordon Chang noted: "The case against China rests not only on how the coronavirus came to first infect humans — something scientists will argue about for years — but also what Chinese ruler Xi Jinping did once the pathogen crippled his country. In short, he took steps he knew or had to know would spread the disease beyond his borders."

Xi's actions "make the infections and deaths outside China deliberate, effectively a 'biological weapon.' His actions taken together constitute both a 'genocide' and a 'crime against humanity' under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court," Chang wrote.

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher wrote to Fauci on Wednesday in search of some answers:

"The State Department has detailed several concerning revelations, including that the U.S. government has reason to believe several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) became sick in autumn 2019 with symptoms consistent with COVID-19, before the first public cases emerged in that community," Gallagher wrote. "How much U.S. government funding has gone to the WIV over time, and how much of that supported gain-of-function research? Did U.S. government funding go to the WIV even during the 2014-2017 U.S. moratorium on funding gain-of-function research?"

Peter Navarro, an assistant to President Donald Trump and early proponent for cutting off travel from China early in the pandemic, said last month there is mounting evidence pointing to laboratory origins of Covid which implicates Fauci.

It was Fauci who “provided the Wuhan lab with both the funding and the green light for gain-of-function experiments,” Navarro noted, adding those are facts that “are not in dispute.”

Related: Navarro: Clear signs show Fauci is ‘father of the pandemic’; Mnuchin blocked Trump commission, April 15, 2021

In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article, Wade writes at length on why he believes a lab-created virus in the case of Covid is much more likely than a natural one, noting that the virus was particularly suited to attack humans and yet there’s little if any evidence showing a natural evolution from a virus that attacks bats to a virus that attacks people:

"It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice. This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising. In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected for a virus grown in humanized mice. It possessed an unusual enhancement, a furin cleavage site, which is not possessed by any other known SARS-related beta-coronavirus, and this site included a double arginine codon also unknown among beta-coronaviruses. What more evidence could you want, aside from the presently unobtainable lab records documenting SARS2’s creation?

"Proponents of natural emergence have a rather harder story to tell... No one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved. There is no explanation of why a natural epidemic should break out in Wuhan and nowhere else. There is no good explanation of how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site, which no other SARS-related beta-coronavirus possesses, nor why the site is composed of human-preferred codons. The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities."

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