Five Reasons Why It Still Wasn't a Lab Leak
Time for some of that civil disagreement that the NIH Director can't get enough of
I haven’t been feeling well lately and haven’t been up to throwing as many punches at fascists as I’d like, which is also why it’s taken a few days—okay, more than a week—to get this up. However, when I learned that Lord Matt Ridley had been invited to speak at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) about his search for the origins of COVID-19 by NIH Director “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya, I reacted like John Wick after his dog got killed. I felt a return of the fighting spirit that earned me rave lab leak reviews like this one.
I was filled with the familiar yet profound irritation that only the ardent believers in the lab leak hypothesis can elicit. They have been going after me for being the Minister of Propaganda for the Zoonati—like the Illuminati except we orchestrate our sinister globalist agenda by studying zoonosis and publicly commenting on it—for years because I wrote peer-reviewed papers on the topic. So I recruited two of my Zoonati comrades and our friends at The Save America Movement, Stand Up for Science, and 27 UNIHTED and we spent nearly 5 hours fact-checking the entire thing. There were a lot of facts to check.
In fact, Ridley’s talk was so devoid of facts, expertise, or good faith, I got pretty fired up about it. Excessive emotion is one of my many disqualifying flaws, according to Ridley, a trait I share with climate scientist Michael Mann, environmental activists, trans people, and the terrorists in Hamas.
The only thing extreme about my emotional state with Ridley is my epic level of annoyance with this obnoxious man, who seems to think that constantly lying about everything from his qualifications to his basic understanding of virology to his intent in advancing right wing political interests in a foreign country is okay so long as you do it politely. He gets away with it by gaslighting his opponents with this civility horseshit.
In my view, it is decidedly uncivil to accuse people of starting a pandemic that killed 20 million people without any evidence to support the allegation, as Ridley has. He insinuates that the pandemic was started by a group of my American colleagues, namely Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, in collaboration with Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Ridley implies this was all funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci, who also compelled my Zoonati co-author Kristian Andersen to help him cover it up by publishing a peer-reviewed academic commentary. He further accuses me and many of my colleagues of participating in the ensuing larger conspiracy to protect virology research, which has involved everyone from top officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) to Xi Jinping to the entire Biden administration to me and my colleagues. He presents no evidence that any of this occurred.
I take issue with Ridley framing a pseudoscientific sermon on his conspiratorial beliefs as a serious scholarly talk, considering I have known pretty confidently since 2022 that it was probably not a lab leak. That’s not because I can prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” or whatever pseudo-legal standards that top lab leakers apply to distract from their lack of evidence. Scientists know that you cannot prove a negative and I know better than to waste my time trying. We can never prove that it wasn’t a lab leak. But we can use the scientific method to see what the evidence tells us about what it was: lab leak, zoonosis in the market, or any of the other sometimes wild (shout out to my fave, panspermia theory—space COVID!) but not very plausible hypotheses.
The totality of the evidence—and there’s a lot—is consistent with spillover from animals to humans at the Huanan market in Wuhan, China, under extremely similar circumstances as SARS-CoV-1. It is incompatible with all lab leak hypotheses proposed. It’s true that the evidence base is incomplete (the WHO origins report mapped out gaps to fill), but that does not mean it is uninformative. It’s very clear what it suggests, if you look only at the evidence and resist Ridley’s urge to indulge in unsupported speculation. This is what it shows.
Five Reasons Why We Think It Was Zoonotic
1. Early cases cluster around the Huanan market
In 2021, our first Zoonati initiative as a larger group of collaborators was a review on origins that was published in Cell. During the process of writing, we observed that reported influenza-like illness didn’t start rising in Wuhan until January 2020, and that reported cases radiated outward from the north side of the Yangtze River. Same with mortality, which increased a couple weeks later and followed the same pattern.
The Huanan market is on the north side of the Yangtze River, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on the south side, about 10 miles away. Chronologically, these increases in hospitalization for respiratory illness and mortality are consistent with lag times following COVID outbreaks. It’s hard not to notice that both COVID cases and excess mortality begin as small clusters north of the Yangtze River that radiate outward over time. This is consistent with an outbreak beginning with a small cluster of cases in one place and gradually spreading in all directions as time passes.
This observation was interesting, so we kept digging and decided to be more analytically rigorous. We extracted the coordinates of early cases of COVID-19 (reported both by Chinese and international sources like the WHO. One of our co-authors painstakingly teased out the timeline of early cases. We superimposed these on a map based on their geospatial coordinates and set out to test the hypothesis that early cases were near the market by chance or because of biased sample collection. We found that the earliest COVID cases form a target, with the Huanan market being the bullseye. We published this study in Science in 2022.
Some people think that, because the market was identified early on by Chinese health authorities as associated with many cases, cases in other parts of Wuhan were missed. They think the concentration of samples at the market render our analysis insignificant because of “ascertainment bias,” the idea that the market was preferentially sampled and thus the data is incomplete and can never be conclusive.
However, if this is true, then cases with no epidemiological link to the market should be randomly distributed around the city. They weren’t. The statistical association with the market is even stronger when all the cases with links to the market are excluded.
Some have suggested that the market was a superspreader event. If this were true, the outbreak would already be underway in Wuhan when the first case linked to the Huanan market appeared. A study testing Wuhan blood bank samples from almost 45,000 donors for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 found nothing until January 2020, a timeline consistent with emergence in late 2019. There is no evidence that anyone in Wuhan had SARS-CoV-2 prior to cases emerging at the Huanan market.
We also know that many of the early cases went to hospitals around the entire city, which has a population of 11 million people. They lived near the Huanan market, whether they went there or not. It seems implausible that if they were getting treatment wherever and they were presumably mobile before that, and yet they all still lived in the immediate vicinity of the Huanan market. The Huanan market was big, but it was by no means the biggest market in Wuhan—not even close. It was, however, one of four that sold live animals. That’s not a coincidence. It’s an epidemiological pattern.
2. Genetic evidence proves the virus was in the part of the market where they sold live animals
The Huanan market was closed on December 31, 2019. This was the day that most of the world found out about the outbreak via this unassuming ProMED-Mail update.
Chinese officials rushed to respond the second there was even a hint of a SARS-related coronavirus. The SARS-CoV-1 outbreaks were a major impetus for China to invest in science and virology research in particular. These outbreaks were still fresh in the national memory, even after 20 years. SARS-CoV-1 spilled over to humans by infected masked palm civets, raccoon dogs, and ferret badgers in live animal markets in Foshan and Guangzhou. The markets remained open for months before they were recognized as the source. This allowed for repeated cross-species transmission, which may have also included transmission from people back to animals in the markets.
The mortality rate of SARS-CoV-1 was 10%. The prospect of SARS-CoV-1 becoming a pandemic was truly frightening. SARS-CoV-1 spread in multiple waves, with secondary cases popping up all over outside of Asia. There was a big outbreak in Canada in early 2003. A lot of transmission occurred in hospital settings. It was not immediately obvious that the virus had been introduced through intermediate live animal hosts. When that was discovered, the Chinese government pledged to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade, although there were concerns about loopholes and enforcement, as well as resistance in the industry. This incredible story from 2003 quotes an animal trader saying that SARS didn’t come from animals, but from foreign germ warfare programs. Evil-government-doing-a-lab-leak has been popular for deflecting blame throughout sarbecovirus emergence history.
The wildlife trade is a multibillion dollar industry in China and is culturally significant and important for food security in some places. That’s why the Chinese government acted swiftly when SARS-CoV-2 was first identified as a SARS-related coronavirus to shut down the market. That might also be why Chinese officials repeatedly denied the involvement of the live animal trade, rapidly shut down farms, sat on environmental sequencing data for years that linked the beginning of the pandemic to the Huanan market, and still have not fully shared all the data requested by WHO. We knew that there were animals at the Huanan market from this paper, in which an international team of researchers catalogued exactly what species were sold there, and how many, through November 2019. We also already know some of those species are susceptible to infection with SARS-CoV-2 and can transmit it to other animals, including raccoon dogs (but also civets, foxes, and minks).
As soon as the Huanan market was linked to the outbreak, it was shut down and decontaminated. Health officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CCDC) collected environmental swabs from around the market and sequenced them to look for virus. When we got hold of this data in a leaked report first published by The Epoch Times, we had data about positivity for virus and location.
So we mapped the virus positivity data out over the market and found that the samples clustered in the southwestern corner. We found additional documentary evidence—administrative records, fines and citations, permits, and so forth—that this was the part of the market where animals were sold.
But we already knew where animals were sold in the market. Our co-author Eddie Holmes, who also is probably one of the world’s greatest living experts on virus evolution in different hosts, visited the Huanan market in 2014. His colleagues at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control took him there as an example of a place where a pandemic could emerge because unregulated live animal sales occurred there. Eddie took some pictures of the animals on sale, including this picture of a caged raccoon dog kept on top of some birds. That same stall had five positive swabs.
Did Eddie Holmes take a picture of the stall where SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from an animal—maybe a raccoon dog, maybe something else—into the human population? We will likely never know, but the evidence certainly points toward that exact scenario.
3. Genetic evidence proves susceptible hosts were present in the section of the market where they sold live animals and where the virus was
In March 2023, I was in my lab meeting when my Zoonati chat started blowing up. The virus sequence repository GISAID had posted FASTQ (raw data) files of the Huanan market samples. Previously, the assembled virus sequences were posted on GISAID, but not the raw data that would contain sequences (called “reads”) from potential host species. We set to work downloading nearly 3 Tb of data file by file.
The next morning, our co-author Alex Crits-Christoph sent a mystery sequence and told us to BLAST it (Google for sequences). It was one of those holy shit scientific moments that all the Zoonati who happened to be in the chat experienced at once when the BLAST results returned a full raccoon dog mitochondrial genome from the reads off a swab taken at Eddie’s stall.
This is hard genetic evidence that a raccoon dog was there to deposit its genetic material on that cart, which was eventually swabbed, sequenced, and turned into the data we fed into BLAST. It also proves that it was there recently enough that it didn’t degrade much, since Alex assembled the whole thing.
In my lab, we separately BLASTed the entire mitochondrial genome against species reported to be at the market, and found similar results. This showed that it wasn’t just residual mitochondrial DNA present, but sequences across the genome. We notified the CCDC of our findings and invited them to collaborate with us. We also notified WHO, since this work had obvious importance to pandemic origins.
It is too much to include here, but this triggered an international incident that resulted in all 19 of us who had downloaded FASTQ files to be kicked off of GISAID until the CCDC authors finally published their findings and shared the full dataset. They used mitochondrial barcoding to identify different species around the market. They also found DNA from wildlife hosts known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 in the southwestern corner.
We went on to use mitochondrial sequences to identify tons of other species throughout the market. We assembled genome sequences from other viruses that happened to be there, including a number of viruses specific to wildlife species we also identified. This puts genetic evidence of susceptible animals at the market, in exactly the part of the market where most of the virus was found. It is not a stretch to imagine how it got there, considering this is exactly what happened with SARS-CoV-1.
The lab leak world melted down in 2023 when I told Katie Wu at The Atlantic that the only real plausible explanation for SARS-CoV-2 genetic material being found in the same place as genetic material from a susceptible intermediate host was it being from an infected animal.
This is not the same thing as saying we found an infected animal. We will not find an infected animal unless we can access samples collected directly from the animals, and there is no evidence such samples were ever taken. We cannot analyze data that wasn’t collected or evaluate evidence that doesn’t exist. But even though we don’t have this, we do have other types of data. Scientists use data to develop hypotheses that explain what happened.
Genetic material from the virus was found in the same place—often in the same swabs—as susceptible host species. How do we explain that data? Viruses do not materialize out of thin air. They can only come from infected host cells. As someone who has devoted my career to studying how viruses infect and cause disease in different hosts, I know that the simplest, most likely explanation for finding RNA from the virus comingled with DNA from susceptible animals, some of which were the same species being handled in the same circumstances as SARS-CoV-1, is an infected animal. It is a hypothesis built on the data, but it is not proven with the data that we have. It is my opinion as a virologist who studies this topic, despite Ridley’s lamentations about the assault on truth in his tale of woe about a friend who found the article more persuasive than he did, that an infected host animal is the most likely explanation for this evidence. If Ridley thinks that is wrong, he is welcome to provide evidence to demonstrate that claim.
I was deeply vexed once again by what has become a pattern of bad faith misinterpretation of normal scientific methods applied to complex questions, so my lab continued this work. I presented my preliminary findings at a meeting in December 2024, and it was covered by both Science and Nature. We used a combination of experimental testing in the lab and our expertise in host transcriptomics to find signatures that indicate an infected host. This will not prove an infected host, no matter what. But it will provide further evidence that we can use to deduce what happened, in the absence of the data that would be conclusive.
We worked with a collaborator to complete some validation experiments, but publication has been unfortunately delayed by events outside my control, including a fairly serious health issue, the rise of fascism, and the existential threat it presents to my country and my profession. However, this work is very important and it is a scientific priority for me, as our findings provide further support to the hypothesis that infected wild animals were present at the Huanan market. We’re finishing it up!
4. There were two separate spillovers
There were two lineages of virus present at the Huanan market, called “A” and “B” (yes, not creative, I know; they are alternatively called “S” and “L”). These two lineages represent two divergent evolutionary paths the virus took. They are distinguished by their sequences. When RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 replicate, they make mistakes as they copy their genomes. These are mutations. Sometimes these are under positive selection (they give the virus an advantage) and become fixed. Sometimes they are just mistakes that are not under selection or are under negative selection, and they appear transiently, and can revert or mutate to something else. All of this mutation results in an elaborate genetic fingerprint that can be used to trace SARS-CoV-2 as it spread from person to person. We can use phylogenetic analysis to look into the past of any given virus, provided we have enough sequence data. SARS-CoV-2 caused a pandemic that infected millions. We have a lot of sequence data.
My colleagues in the evolutionary virology department over at Zoonati HQ were working on a model that could simulate various spillover scenarios by analyzing sequences from early cases, as well as the millions of sequences that followed as SARS-CoV-2 spread around the world, acquiring tell-tale mutations as it went. Their work showed that single spillover scenarios were not likely, meaning lineage A and B did not diverge in humans. They have gone on to show this more rigorously. If they didn’t diverge in humans, then they either diverged in an intermediate host or in the lab.
The known cases associated with the market were all lineage B. However, the market hypothesis predicts that both lineages would be present at Huanan market, since they diverged in a host being sold there. This prediction came true when the CCDC first released their preprint in February 2022 and revealed a lineage A sequence at the market. This is consistent with the virus diverging in intermediate animal host(s), and then spilling over into humans at least twice, one to two weeks apart. I say “at least” because the lineages represent the two times we know about, since sustained human-to-human transmission was established and we can study all the sequences of the viruses that evolved from these initial introductions.
A lab leak scenario that fits with these two spillovers is much more farfetched. In order for these data to be consistent with a lab leak, someone working at the WIV, which is over 10 miles away on the other side of the Yangtze River, gets infected with lineage B at work. They go straight to the Huanan market without infecting anyone else along the way. They only infect other people at or near the Huanan market. Then, one to two weeks later, the same thing happens with lineage A.
Almost anything is possible. It’s possible that Ridley will realize the error of his ways and apologize for comparing me to Hamas because I swore on Twitter, but even compared to that, this seems pretty farfetched. Even if you are willing to believe biosafety practices are so bad that lab leaks happen constantly at WIV, how do you explain getting two independently infected lab workers all the way to the market without infecting anyone else at work, home, or anywhere else in Wuhan they happened to go? They are really good at accidental virus infection at work, but not anywhere else? Contrary to claims made by Ridley, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report declassified in 2023 verifies that there were no lab workers confirmed to have COVID-19. One of the accused lab workers, Ben Hu, has vehemently denied getting sick at all in late 2019 and further verified Shi’s claim that he tested negative for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in March 2020, meaning he had never been exposed to the virus.
Does it make more sense that this technically possible but very unlikely dual lab leak occurred? Or does it make more sense that SARS-CoV-2—a virus that is very good at infecting a LOT of different species without any adaptation—found its way into an intermediate host on sale at Huanan market, and then found its way into humans in a city of 11 million people, where sustained spread and further adaptation could occur? The latter scenario is exactly what happened with SARS-CoV-1. The evidence suggests that zoonotic spillover is also what happened with SARS-CoV-2.
5. The evidence is not consistent with any plausible lab leak scenario
The fact is that there is only one piece of hard evidence consistent with a lab leak: the pandemic started in Wuhan and there is a lab that studies coronaviruses there. There are labs that study coronaviruses in every major city in China. Coronavirus research drove heavy investment in Chinese science as a result of the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak. We have many Chinese colleagues who have contributed enormously to our understanding of coronaviruses in general. Wuhan is not special in that it has labs studying SARS-related coronaviruses.
There is no other evidence supporting a lab leak besides speculative or selective interpretation of cherry-picked data. That hasn’t changed since 2020. Back in 2020, that is all Kristian Andersen knew when he looked at the sequence to SARS-CoV-2 and thought it was weird and possibly artificial. So he did what scientists do: consulted experts and collaborated to analyze the data and eventually wrote a paper on it. This paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, is one of the most downloaded, talked about, and cited publications from the entire pandemic. It looks at the genome sequence and assess three hypotheses: 1. Natural selection in an animal prior to zoonosis, 2. Natural selection in humans after zoonosis, 3. Selection in a lab after passage.
In the course of writing the paper and analyzing the data, the Proximal Origin authors changed their minds. They found scientific explanations for the features they previously thought were weird. They described this in the paper, which underwent peer review. It’s held up well, considering how little the authors knew about SARS-CoV-2 at the time.
“Since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD (receptor binding domain of spike) and polybasic cleavage site (furin cleavage site), in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
-The Proximal Origin conclusion that fueled a thousand angry leaker tweets
The data is still incomplete. WHO has called for China to share their data fully. That may never happen. We need to do the best that we can with what we have. Fortunately, we have a lot. It all points to the market. My co-author Mike Worobey and I have written multiple pieces, including for The Globe and Mail (shout out to Canada) and Foreign Policy. We’ve all given many interviews. No matter how much evidence we share, how hard we endeavor to explain it, or how many papers we publish, the lab leak faithful continue to insist that our work is shoddy, unsound, and even fraudulent. I have been given a great deal of feedback about my many inadequacies and failures as a scientist, virologist, advocate, trusted expert, and human being, including about and from Bhattacharya, as well. I am “unhinged and nasty,” and incompetent because I disagree that he has anything useful to contribute whatsoever except passive-aggressive whining that it’s rude of me to call out the fact that he is an unqualified liar with no evidence to support his claims.
There is one piece of evidence that would make me immediately convert to lab leaker: evidence that the WIV possessed a progenitor virus (a virus that is similar enough to SARS-CoV-2 that it was used to create SARS-CoV-2). There is no evidence that WIV had ever collected a virus similar enough that it could have been passaged, engineered, or otherwise become SARS-CoV-2. We can’t prove this evidence doesn’t exist, but I think it is telling that the closest relative was found by a different team of scientists in bats in Laos. These viruses could not become SARS-CoV-2 either, but the point is that the WIV didn’t even have the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 in their collection, much less a progenitor.
Ridley’s talk contained all the classics in the things-that-might-have-happened-in-Matt-Ridley’s-imagination-but-didn’t JAQ off (just asking questions) bingo card about origins science:
There’s a furin cleavage site with two CGG arginine codons in a row, and according to Nobel laureate David Baltimore, this is a “smoking gun”. What if this is the molecular virology equivalent of writing “Shi Zhengli was here” in genetic code and then what if it leaked?
What if Shi and Daszak went virus hunting and found the SARS-CoV-2 progenitor virus and kept it a secret and then what if it leaked?
There was an unfunded application to DARPA that talked about sticking furin cleavage sites into other coronavirus backbones. What if Baric and Dazsak dug $14 million out from their couch cushions to do the work anyway and then what if it leaked?
What if Fauci funded biodefense and was concerned about emerging pandemics because he was actually a sociopath and secret bioterrorist and was getting paid by Big Pharma and the globalists to fund dangerous gain-of-function (DGOF) research (juicing up viruses to make them deadlier and more transmissible) and then what if it leaked?
What if Ralph Baric was doing secret DGOF and made SARS-CoV-2 and then what if it leaked?
What if Baric was a spy and gave his DGOF recipes to Shi and what if she made SARS-CoV-2 and then what if it leaked?
What if (invented complaint about Baric, Daszak, Shi, or Fauci) proves that they were doing DGOF with other totally different viruses but what if they secretly had SARS-CoV-2 and DGOFed it and then what if it leaked?
Because lab leaks have happened before, what if they actually were happening all the time because biosafety level 2 (BSL2) is inherently unsafe (it is the US standard for handling bat SARS-related coronaviruses per the Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories, 6th Edition) and what if they were DGOFing SARS-CoV-2 at BSL2 and then what if it leaked?
Ridley loves to talk biosafety despite never having worked in any type of containment lab, nor taking anyone seriously who has, so I’ll just close this off with footage of me from 2024 demonstrating both proper biocontainment practices for working with SARS-CoV-2 in my lab, as well as going over the evidence for the origin of the pandemic. Who are you going to believe, the unqualified British pheasant mating expert and popular book author, who is just going to ask leading questions about speculative scenarios he made up? Or me, the virologist who actually has made genuine, evidence-based contributions to our understanding of how the pandemic began?
Yes, I know I am not a neutral party since we’re talking about my skills relative to an officious, interloping, deeply overconfident amateur, but I’m willing to wager all the coal in the earth beneath Ridley’s ancestral manor lands that I have more experience handling pandemic viruses than the 5th Viscount.
Why is NIH hosting lab leak lectures?
I don’t know Ridley’s motivation besides being a pompous literal coal baron who led the UK into the 2007 financial crisis with the first run on a British bank in 130 years, and who expects to be taken seriously despite the fact that he seems like a foppish secondary antagonist in a forgettable Dr. Who episode. Unfortunately, Ridley is taken seriously by his fellow pompous, insubstantial windbags, and even more unfortunately, they are the windbags in charge who invited him.
It is no mystery why Podcast Jay rolled out the red carpet for the distinguished Viscount despite his lack of qualifications or relevant expertise on the topic. He knows that Matt Ridley is writing fiction. He shows up to launder conspiracist lies through an indignant upper class British accent in service of Bhattacharya’s ultimate goal: to declare all NIH research reckless, dangerous, and absolutely the worst thing we could possibly do. Better redirect the money for these irresponsible Alzheimer’s, HIV, and diabetes treatments to the White House. President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought will know what to do with all those funds.
Indeed, Matt King Coal dutifully validated Podcast Jay’s revisionist history that prior to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) regime, pandemic preparedness in the US proceeded as follows:
Go virus hunting
Unrestricted DGOF: VIROLOGIST PARADISE
Make vaccines against our new DGOFed superviruses for the strategic national stockpile
CASH IN WITH BIG PHARMA
This is not remotely true. Most pandemic preparedness concerned hospitals and health care infrastructure and services. Of the research funded by NIAID, development of new vaccine technologies like mRNA against known pathogens (flu, MERS-CoV, RSV, CMV, etc) was a much bigger component of pandemic preparedness than virus discovery. Bhattacharya has eagerly participated in cutting this research already, then claiming that it’s because mRNA vaccines “lost trust.”
However, Ridley happily aided Bhattacharya in lending credibility to this idea by getting on stage and claiming with no evidence or any relevant expertise whatsoever that the pandemic began through efforts to prevent pandemics, because that is going to be the excuse for gutting the NIH.
Many people are unaware that last May President Trump’s Executive Order on Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research put major restrictions in place that can be interpreted to effectively ban a significant chunk of research. Not just virology research; ALL biomedical research.
When the COVID.gov website transformed into the LAB LEAK cautionary tale of design and font choices that it is today, I finally understood the endgame of the lab leak misery that has tormented me for the past six years:
If the pandemic was caused by a lab leak, then we need to shut down the labs
If pandemics are caused by lab leaks, then we will no longer be in danger of pandemics if we shut down the labs
Lab leaks are the result of research, which has many risks
If we want to minimize risks, we should stop doing research and just get healthy
MAHA!!!!
This “pandemic preparedness” plan and approach to risk mitigation, otherwise known as “doing nothing so we can illegally impound the Congressionally appropriated NIH budget”, is completely divorced from reality, evidence, and the interests of the American people.
And think about this: what if he is wrong? What if lab leaks aren’t a big pandemic risk, but natural pandemics are? Are you willing to trust $48 billion of your tax dollars to Podcast Jay, who says to trust him and Ridley, despite neither of them giving any reason to do so. If the NIH continues to lose its functionality in advancing American scientific research, we will hardly be in a position to stand up another Operation Warp Speed or respond at all to an emerging outbreak, wherever it comes from. The fact is, all of the data also shows that naturally emerging viruses are a much bigger threat than lab leaks. All of the emerging threats we face today: H5N1, dengue virus, West Nile virus, Chikungunya virus, Zika virus, MERS-CoV, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus, mpox, Rift Valley fever virus, and many, many more including those we haven’t discovered yet did not come from labs. They came from the most unregulated, least responsible DGOF virologist of all time: Mother Nature.
If H5N1 gained the ability to transmit between people tomorrow and maintained its mortality rate in a preimmune population, it would kill 2% of infected people, or about 165 million people worldwide in a pandemic. That’s a lot more than COVID. If we waste all our resources avoiding imaginary threats presented by imaginary virologists doing imaginary research, we will have nothing left to counter the very real threats that we face. Using “lab leak” to justify the theft of the NIH budget will make us terribly vulnerable to medical emergencies, and the potential to massively amplify the toll of another pandemic.
We should not have to spend an afternoon correcting the NIH Director as he lies about our research and about other NIH-funded work. We should not have an NIH Director who accuses his colleagues—or anyone—of starting a pandemic that killed millions around the world without evidence to back up such a serious accusation. We should not have an NIH Director who invites propagandists like Ridley to distract from the fact that he is actively destroying the agency he has been tasked with leading. His leadership has been characterized thus far by inaction, double-speak, corruption, cronyism, political partisanship, and the annihilation of America’s entire biomedical future.
In my professional field, whether you are talking about grants, publication, or any type of scientific, evidence-based reporting, truthfulness is key. In every research ethics training I have ever taken, you learn that lying is a form of scientific misconduct. Fabricating data, misleading, manipulating data, and being intentionally untruthful about your data is scientific misconduct. Bhattacharya engages in it regularly.
The evidence is clear: all of the evidence aligns with SARS-CoV-2 emerging into the human population by zoonotic spillover at the Huanan market. None of the evidence, except for the pandemic starting in Wuhan, is consistent with a lab leak. We need to understand how pandemics begin to effectively respond to them, much less prevent them. My co-authors and I have done that, as have many of our colleagues.
The NIH Director (and Acting CDC Director) are rejecting this in favor of politics. It will cripple our health and economy in the process, and slow our engine of American innovation to a grinding halt. We will all become sicker, not more healthy. By using the lab leak to justify defunding research across the board, we will shut off our pipeline of new medicines and vaccines. We will be sitting ducks for the next pandemic, with nothing ready to go, and no ability to study anything quickly enough to make a difference. The body count will be astronomical if this happens with H5N1.
Bhattacharya cannot be allowed to inflict such a profound injury on Americans using the pretext that he just thinks it came from a lab because he doesn’t like the scientists who showed evidence that, once again, his ideas about pandemics are wrong. Like the lab leak hypothesis itself, he has failed testing. He has no justification for his position. His leadership endangers us all. Bhattacharya must be removed.
Key papers and reviews (not comprehensive):
Andersen et al, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Medicine, 2020: The paper that started the Zoonati, it shows that SARS-CoV-2 was not likely the result of engineering or passaging in a lab
World Health Organization, WHO-convened Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part, 2021: WHO China mission from January 2021
Xiao et al, Animal sales from Wuhan wet markets immediately prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientific Reports, 2021: Observed evidence of animals at Huanan market
Holmes et al, The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review. Cell, 2021: Evidence review
Worobey, Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan. Science, 2021: Identification, timing, and location of early cases
Worobey et al, The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Science, 2022: Early cases cluster around the Huanan market, even after controlling for bias. Animals cluster in the southwestern corner of the market.
Pekar et al, The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2. Science, 2022: Evidence and timing of two spillovers, about 1-2 weeks apart.
Jiang and Wang. Wildlife trade is likely the source of SARS-CoV-2. Science, 2022: Risk of new pandemic emerging due to live animal trade
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This is the most straight forward explanation that a lay person such as my self can follow and understand. Thank you so much for providing this.
Bravo!!! Outstanding writing Dr Rasmussen. Excellent analysis. What I get frustrated with as well is the few times Dr Jay Bhatt has been to testify before the Senate except for a few harder questions, he gets all soft balls!! The Dems should get together & decide who will ask what questions and for for pete's sake challenge him more than what you do!! Geesh.