New Coronavirus News from 27 Sep 2021

Leaked DARPA docs reveal plans for risky research with Wuhan lab [Taiwan News, 27 Sep 2021]

By Keoni Everington

Plan included work on humanized and 'batified' mice, adding furin cleavage sites, and 'vaccinating' wild bats

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Leaked documents from a scuttled research grant proposal calling for collaboration between labs in Wuhan and the U.S. military are raising concerns about the dangerous nature of the experiments on coronaviruses possibly conducted prior to the start of the pandemic

On Sept. 21, Drastic Research, an international network of scientists investigating the origins of the pandemic, exposed a grant proposal presented to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) by U.S.-based research organization EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) and headed by British zoologist Peter Daszak. The documents, which were leaked by an anonymous whistleblower, detail a US$14 million proposal dubbed “Project DEFUSE" that sought to identify the spillover risk of coronaviruses to "US warfighters" but was ultimately rejected due to potential gain of function (GoF) and DURC (dual use research of concern) research elements.

The proposal for the US$14 million grant, titled DEFUS (Defusing the Threat of Bat-Borne Coronaviruses), was submitted in 2018 and would have run from that year until 2022. EHA was requesting US$14,209,245 in funding and would have allocated US$1,182,877 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), with much of the rest subcontracted to the University of North Carolina, National University Singapore, United States Geological Survey Wildlife Health Center, and Palo Alto Research Center.

Among the more controversial proposed experiments presented in the application were the creation of bat coronavirus chimeras that would contain human-specific furin cleavage sites (FCS), the introduction of these viruses into humanized and "batified" mice, and a grandiose plan to "vaccinate" wild bats in caves against coronaviruses.

The mention of inserting FCS is significant because scientists consider the presence of these on the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 to be one of the reasons why the virus is able to easily infect humans. Within the betacoronaviruses of sarbecovirus lineage B, the polybasic furin cleavage site is unique to SARS-CoV-2, according to News Medical Life Sciences.

Scientists who favor the lab-leak hypothesis point to the unusual presence of the FCS as an indication of manipulation in a laboratory. Advocates of the natural origin hypothesis argue that although the FCS is not documented in other sarbecoviruses, it does appear in other distant relatives such as MERS.

"Humanized mice" describes mice that have been genetically modified to express the human ACE2 protein, and in this proposal, WIV lead researcher Shi Zhengli (石正麗) — also known as "Bat Woman," would oversee work on these rodents. "Batified mice" refers to mice that have been irradiated and injected with the bone marrow of bats to simulate the response of bats to viruses and treatments.

The most ambitious phase of the project was to vaccinate wild bats using aerosolized viruses. This was to include both broadscale immune boosting with "immune modulators" and targeted immune boosting with "novel chimeric polyvalent recombinant spike proteins."

In one of the most controversial segments, the authors of the project proposed synthesizing spike glycoproteins, which bind to human cell receptors, and inserting them into SARSr-CoV backbones to assess whether they could cause SARS-like disease while declaring that it would not constitute GoF or DURC." However, in his summary sheet of the grant proposal, James Gimlett, program manager of DARPA's Biotechnical Technolgies Office, wrote that the team had failed to "mention or assess the potential risks" of GoF or DURC.

Gimlett then stated that the team's approach of synthesizing spike proteins and inserting them into the backbones of SARS-related coronaviruses "does potentially involve GoF/DURC research" and that if the project was approved, an "appropriate DURC risk mitigation plan should be incorporated" into the documentation. His conclusion was to deny funding for the proposal due to lack of "data, statistical analyses, model development," doubts about the efficacy of the bat inoculation program, and concerns over GoF/DURC.

As for similar projects that successfully secured funding, The Intercept on Sept. 6 released 900 pages of documents detailing work that EHA engaged with the WIV with funding from the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH). One of the grants was a 5-year project slated to run from 2014 to 2019 titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence," which provided EHA with a total of US$3.1 million, including US$599,000 allocated to the WIV.

In the grant notice, EHA stated that it had generated a chimeric virus with a spike protein with a 10% divergence from SARS-CoV. The notice added that the chimera had "replicated in primary human airway epithelium, using the human ACE2 receptor to enter into cells" in the transgenic mice.

In 2019, just before the known start of the pandemic, WIV assistant researcher Hu Ben (胡犇) began his work on a project titled "Pathogenicity of 2 new bat SARS-related covs to transgenic mice expressing human ACE2." No information about this research has been released to the public since the start of the pandemic, including data on the eight chimeric viruses the WIV had been infecting the mice with.

Stuart Neil, a professor of virology at King's College London, conceded on Twitter that the DARPA documents reveal "GoF however you want to cut it." Neil said that he was "troubled" that the information is only being released at this late date and that there are "aspects of this proposal that are concerning from a DURC and GoF point of view."

Jamie Metzl, a WHO committee member, said on Twitter that given the revelation of Daszak's "undisclosed conflicts of interest & material nondisclosure" of the DARPA grant application, the time has come for the WHO to begin an official investigation into his participation in the study of COVID's origins and to "retract its deeply flawed report." Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright wrote that the EHA application "outlines several risky research projects" that included the introduction of human-specific cleavage sties into SARS-like viruses.

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, reacted on Twitter to the leaked DARPA documents by remarking that such information would have been invaluable at the start of the pandemic: "Imagine if the public had this info in Jan 2020."

Chan noted that while scientists such as Neil have pointed out that the proposal was not successful, it does not mean such work was not already underway at the time of the proposal.
"When you see this level of detail, there's a good chance some preliminary work has been done."

Some scientists might argue that the proposal was not successful - DARPA did not fund it. But it doesn't mean it wasn't already ongoing even at the time of proposal. When you see this level of detail, there's a good chance some preliminary work has been done.

House Intel GOP demand Biden instruct top spy office to reveal scientists who helped with COVID-19 origins report [Yahoo News, 27 Sep 2021]

By Jerry Dunleavy

House Intelligence Committee Republicans accused the Biden administration's top intelligence office of "stonewalling" congressional overseers from learning about outside doctors and scientists whom U.S. spy agencies relied upon to put together a report assessing the origins of COVID-19.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member on the panel, was joined by nine fellow GOP members who said they had no confidence in the origins assessment because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence personnel who briefed them had declined to identify which scientists were consulted during the investigation, which did not provide a definitive conclusion on whether the virus was transmitted to humans naturally or through a lab leak in China.

"This is fundamental oversight of the IC’s work. We need this information to determine whether there was any selection bias in choosing the outside scientists to consult. We also need it to determine whether any of the scientists had conflicts of interest that should affect the weight given their analyses," the Republicans wrote in a letter to Biden dated Friday.

Nunes, a California Republican, revealed the letter during an appearance on Sunday Morning Futures on Fox News.

“It looks like there needs to be an entire new report that needs to be written, because Republican members on the committee have basically had enough of this. It just looks like this is another attempt to obfuscate and protect China once again by the Biden administration," he told host Maria Bartiromo.

The interview took place shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported that a panel of scientists investigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus had disbanded, citing concerns about its links to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit group that had used U.S. funds for research on bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, who dismissed the lab leak hypothesis in March, recused himself from the investigation over the summer.

A letter signed by 27 scientists, including Daszak, was published in Lancet in February 2020, dismissing the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. Numerous outlets pointed to the letter and to Daszak, who had recruited scientists to sign the letter, to shut down the debate over COVID-19’s origins.

Dr. Anthony Fauci quietly worked behind the scenes to cast doubt on the lab leak hypothesis in 2020, and he and Daszak were in communication at the time, emails show.

Daszak was also a key member of the World Health Organization-China joint study team earlier this year. The WHO-China report was widely considered a failure, partly due to the lack of access to key data and Chinese influence over the investigation.

The WHO-China study deemed the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely,” and meeting minutes with the Wuhan lab dismissed it as a “conspiracy theory.”

In July, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said there was a "premature push" to dismiss the lab theory, but the Chinese government shot down the suggestion of a second investigation.

In their new letter, the House Intelligence Republicans claimed ODNI staff did not respect the oversight role the panel has over the U.S. intelligence community.

“Shockingly, ODNI has repeatedly refused to tell the Committee which scientists the IC consulted. When pressed on the basis for this refusal during our hearing, ODNI staff acknowledged there is no law or regulation prohibiting them from revealing these names to us. Instead, they simply refused again in a hostile manner, claiming it is their ‘policy’ to do so,” the GOP group said.

After Biden called on the intelligence community to “redouble” its origins investigation in May and gave it a 90-day clock, an unclassified report was released by ODNI last month.

The assessment stated that one U.S. intelligence agency assesses with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe with “low confidence” COVID-19 most likely has a natural origin. Other parts of the U.S. intelligence community remain on the fence.

The one unnamed spy agency leaning toward the Wuhan lab theory with "moderate confidence" assessed that "the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling" by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The four unnamed spy agencies, along with the NIC, with "low confidence" in the natural origin hypothesis assessed "the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus.”

The Republicans argued in their letter that the intelligence community failed to live up to Biden's own words when he said on May 26, “I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work," and urged him to crack down.

“Outside doctors and scientists who were consulted for their technical analyses of COVID’s potential origins are not clandestine sources or spies. They are consultants and there is no basis for stonewalling the Committee about their identities … I respectfully ask that you rectify this situation by instructing the ODNI to cease stonewalling Congressional oversight and to immediately disclose to the Committee the full list of all outside doctors and scientists consulted in the investigation of COVID’s origins," Nunes and his fellow Republicans wrote.

Nunes also stressed that what ODNI presented in the summer did not match what he demanded in the spring.

“In May, I wrote to you requesting that you initiate a whole-of-government effort to identify the origins of the virus. However, you opted for a much narrower review solely by the Intelligence Community,” Nunes and his fellow Republicans told Biden. “The Committee has reviewed the resulting IC report and received a briefing from Office of the Director of National Intelligence personnel. Based on the IC’s appalling lack of transparency and the ODNI staff’s hostile response to simple questions, we have little confidence in the DNI’s report.”

The Washington Examiner reached out to ODNI for comment.

The Lancet Gives Up On COVID-19 Origins [National Review, 27 Sep 2021]

By JIM GERAGHTY

On the menu today: The Lancet medical journal abruptly disbands its investigation into the origins of COVID-19; the World Health Organization inches toward a new COVID investigation; the U.S. government is mum about any further COVID investigation on its part; a 2018 grant proposal shows that Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance lied from the start; President Biden takes it easy; President Trump only wants to talk about one thing; and South Carolina senator Tim Scott makes an important point about minority communities and the police.

Apparently, Investigating the Origins of COVID-19 Is Just Too Hard for Scientific Journals
Back in June 2020, the medical journal The Lancet formed a commission to investigate and offer guidance on all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including a pledge to create a task force focusing on “the nature, origin, and prevention of zoonotic diseases.” The Lancet named Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University, one of the world’s most celebrated experts on international development and an adviser to the United Nations, as chairman of the commission.

By November 2020, the commission had formed the task force on COVID-19’s origins and selected Dr. Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, to chair it. You didn’t have to be a wide-eyed conspiracy theorist to find a problem with a man who had extensive financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology being the one in charge of investigating whether a global pandemic started from an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak is the favorite American COVID-19 expert of Chinese-state-run media. What’s more, in an interview with the state-run Global Times in February 2021, Daszak echoed the supremely implausible claim of the Chinese government that SARS-CoV-2 originated in another country and was somehow imported into Wuhan. Daszak stated that EcoHealth Alliance was focusing its own investigation into the origins of COVID-19 by examining similar viruses in Thailand, Japan, and Cambodia. After being the only American whom the Chinese government would allow to visit Wuhan as part of the World Health Organization team, Daszak said in a March interview with CBS News’ Leslie Stahl that, “It wasn’t our task to find out if China had covered up the origin issue.”
Daszak said he took his Chinese colleagues at their word that there was no reason to suspect a lab leak.

In June, Daszak recused himself from the COVID-19 commission established by The Lancet — not over his public embrace of China’s implausible blame-shifting theories but because of complaints that he didn’t disclose past conflicts of interest in his contributions to that journal.

The good news is that Sachs has realized that the conflict of interest goes beyond Daszak, concluding that other members of the task force had collaborated with Dr. Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on various projects. The bad news is that Sachs has disbanded the entire commission investigating the origin of COVID-19, and instead the commission will “continue studying the origins for a report to be published in mid-2022 but broaden its scope to include input from other experts on biosafety concerns including government oversight and transparency regarding risky laboratory research,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Lancet’s investigation has ceased; apparently it is just too hard to find qualified scientific minds who don’t have some past tie to Daszak or EcoHealth.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is launching a new investigation: “A new team of about 20 scientists — including specialists in laboratory safety and biosecurity and geneticists and animal-disease experts versed in how viruses spill over from nature — is being assembled with a mandate to hunt for new evidence in China and elsewhere.” This represents a modest win for the Biden administration, as “officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have pressed WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus publicly and privately to renew the inquiry, which is likely to include at least one American.”

It is unclear how intensely the U.S. government is still investigating the origins of a pandemic that has killed at least 4.7 million people worldwide (some estimates put it much higher), infected 232 million, briefly shut down the world, disrupted the education of hundreds of millions of children, and set off a global economic slowdown.

Back on May 26, President Biden announced that he had “asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days. As part of that report, I have asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China. I have also asked that this effort include work by our National Labs and other agencies of our government to augment the Intelligence Community’s efforts. And I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work.”

Three months later, the U.S. intelligence community came back with a report that was useless, offering almost nothing new to what was publicly known about the start of the pandemic. The publicly released summary of its investigation is barely a page and a half, and offered less information than most lengthy magazine pieces, offering the obvious and unhelpful conclusion that “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and laboratory-associated incident.”

Neither the intelligence community nor the Biden administration ever shared any specific questions for China. We never heard any details about any work by the National Labs.
Whatever the intelligence community did find out in those three months, the Biden administration and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines have no interest in sharing it with the American people or the world. No one in the administration has said anything about the origins of COVID-19 since the intelligence community’s report arrived.

One aspect of the ongoing debate that is particularly frustrating is that nearly two years after the pandemic started, some (possibly disingenuous) voices still insist that any evidence of a zoonotic origin — that is, evidence that the virus jumped from a bat or other animal — is ipso facto evidence that the pandemic could not be caused by a lab leak. But the Wuhan Institute of Virology kept live bats within its walls, a verified fact that Daszak initially denied. We know that in the past, Chinese researchers and EcoHealth Alliance researchers collected bats in the wild without protective equipment. And we know visiting American researchers concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology suffered from “a shortage of the highly trained technicians and investigators required to safely operate a [Biosafety Level] 4 laboratory and lack of clarity in related Chinese government policies and guidelines.”

We also know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats — that is, taking existing novel coronaviruses found in bats and figuring out ways to make them more virulent and more contagious. And in a point that cannot be emphasized enough, the pandemic began on the metaphorical doorstep of one of three institutions in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses in bats.

As Dr. Richard Ebright, a board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, summarized it to Vanity Fair, “It’s not a dozen cities. It’s three places.”

The independent investigative group DRASTIC found a March 2018 grant proposal from EcoHealth to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposing an effort to “introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites” into SARS-like viruses; in other words, to take existing bat viruses and make them more likely to infect human beings. The proposal declared that “Dr. Shi, Wuhan Institute of Virology will conduct viral testing on all collected samples, binding assays and some humanized mouse work.” This is Shi Zhengli, nicknamed “Bat Woman,” who said in a March 2020 interview with Scientific American that when she first heard of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, one of her first questions was, “Could they have come from our lab?” She vehemently denies that the WIV is the source of the virus.

Over at The Atlantic, Daniel Engber and Adam Federman examined the EcoHealth proposal to DARPA; the headline concludes that, “The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier,” which is a painfully obfuscatory summary. (Engber and Federman may not have written the headline.)
Their piece ends with a not-very-messy conclusion:
In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak ridiculed discussions of the furin cleavage site and whether it might be bioengineered as the ranting of conspiracy theorists. Six months later, Daszak was involved in two major, international investigations into the pandemic’s origins, organized by the World Health Organization and the British medical journal The Lancet. Now it appears that, just a few years earlier, he’d delivered a detailed grant proposal to the U.S. government, with himself as principal investigator, that described doing exactly that bioengineering work. “It’s just shocking,” Chan said.

The pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important information has been withheld. Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month delay, that describe experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and the U.S. government.

What’s fascinating is that we have a new virus whose genetic code is most similar to those found in samples taken from a mineshaft in southern China and taken to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for additional study, a Chinese government that lied at every step of the opening weeks of the pandemic, and a U.S. virus-research bureaucracy that has deliberately withheld, covered up, lied, and obscured relevant information . . . and some people still dismiss all of this as a “conspiracy theory.”

Presidential-Schedule Watch
President Biden has had two public events in the past four days, both around the middle of the day on Friday. As of this writing, there are no public events on his schedule for Monday.

Trumpian Monomania
Almost everyone thinks Donald Trump will run for president again in 2024, and many people inside and outside of the Republican Party think the GOP nomination is his for the taking. But Americans see Trump differently than they did in 2016, and he may even be considerably different than he was on the campaign trail in 2020. Have you bothered to look at Trump’s online public-statement archive, the de facto substitute for his Twitter account? About 90-some percent of the former president’s comments focus on his unhinged belief that he’s the real winner of the 2020 election. “Massive fraud was found in the Arizona Forensic Audit, sometimes referred to as ‘Fraudit.’ The numbers are Election Changing!” “The Fake News Media refuses to write the facts, thereby being complicit in the Crime of the Century. They are so dishonest, but Patriots know the truth! Arizona must immediately decertify their 2020 Presidential Election Results.” “Hopefully the Unselect Committee will be calling witnesses on the Rigged Presidential Election of 2020, which is the primary reason that hundreds of thousands of people went to Washington, D.C. in the first place.”

If President Trump thinks about anything besides nutty conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, he hides it well. He doesn’t talk about Americans left in Afghanistan. He doesn’t talk about inflation. He has little interest in the giant spending bills being negotiated in Congress. He barely mentions China, and certainly doesn’t comment on it in depth. He doesn’t even talk about the border much anymore.

Trump’s favorite topic is himself. But his political success was driven in large part by his willingness to talk about issues that affected other people — immigration and trade, but also taxes, regulation, judicial selections, crime, and bombing-the-you-know-what out of ISIS, etc. If the Donald Trump of the 2024 cycle goes on the campaign trail and focuses obsessively about audits and rigged elections and re-litigating 2020, it is fair to wonder how many people will still be thinking about the previous presidential election — particularly in contrast to candidates who are talking about the road ahead, instead of what’s in the rear-view mirror.

ADDENDUM: Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, writing in the most recent issue of NATIONAL REVIEW: “For too long the liberal media have convinced folks that there is a binary choice between the police and communities of color. It’s clear that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. An investment in bettering our police is an investment in the communities they serve. You have to help one to help the other.”

New Coronavirus News from 26 Sep 2021

The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier [The Atlantic, 26 Sep 2021]

By Daniel Engber and Adam Federman

A new leaked document is stirring up another frenzy over the pandemic’s origins. What does it really tell us?

As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that in the likeliest scenario SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease.

The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.” Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

The document seems almost tailor-made to buttress one specific theory of a laboratory origin: that SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t simply brought into a lab by scientists and then released by accident, but rather pieced together in a deliberate fashion. In fact, the work described in the proposal fits so well into that narrative of a “gain-of-function experiment gone wrong” that some wondered if it might be too good to be true. Central figures in the coronavirus-origins debate were involved: Among Daszak’s listed partners on the grant were Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an American virologist known for doing coronavirus gain-of-function studies in his lab, and Shi Zhengli, the renowned virus hunter from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Shi Zhengli has not responded to a request for comment. A UNC spokesperson responded on behalf of Baric, noting that “the grant applicant and DARPA are best positioned to explain the proposal.”)

There is good reason to believe the document is genuine. The Atlantic has confirmed that a grant proposal with the same identifying number and co-investigators was submitted to DARPA in 2018. The proposal that circulated online includes an ambitious scheme to inoculate wild bats against coronaviruses, carried out in concert with the National Wildlife Health Center, a research lab in Wisconsin. A spokesperson for the U.S. Geological Survey, which oversees the center, acknowledged this connection and affirmed the identifying number and co-investigators, noting that the agency’s involvement in the project ended with DARPA’s rejection of the grant proposal. “This is the proposal that was not funded,” USGS Acting Public Affairs Chief Rachel Pawlitz said after reviewing the PDF. She could not, however, vouch for the document in its entirety.

Jared Adams, DARPA’s chief of communications, said in an emailed statement that the agency was not at liberty to discuss proposals submitted as part of its emerging-pathogenic-threat program, which was launched in January 2018, and that DARPA has never funded “any activity or researcher associated with EcoHealth Alliance or Wuhan Institute of Virology.” An article about the proposal published yesterday in The Intercept points to a tweet by Daszak last weekend, before the PDF was widely shared, that refers obliquely to the release of unfunded grant proposals.

For anyone looking for the great, final vindication of the lab-leak hypothesis, this document will leave you wanting. Does the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have an unnatural origin? The answer hasn’t changed: probably not. But we have learned something quite disturbing in the past few days, simply from how and when this information came to light.

The pandemic-origins debate is a big, confusing mess—but it’s an important mess, so bear with us. The hottest news in the leaked proposal concerns the researcher’s plan to sift through a large trove of genomic-sequence data drawn from samples of bat blood, feces, and other fluids, in search of (among other things) new kinds of “furin cleavage sites.” When these are encoded into just the right spot on the spike protein of a coronavirus, they allow that spike to be opened up by an enzyme found in human cells. According to the proposal, “high-risk” versions of these sites, once identified, would then be introduced via genetic engineering into SARS-like coronaviruses.

Daniel Engber: Don’t fall for these lab-leak traps
Why does this matter? We’ve long known that the presence of such a site in SARS-CoV-2 increased its pathogenic power, and we also know that similar features have not been found in any other SARS-like coronavirus (though we may find them in the future). For lab-leak proponents, these facts—combined with certain details of the furin cleavage site’s structure—strongly hint at human intervention. As the science journalist Nicholas Wade argued in an influential lab-leak-theory brief last spring, this genetic insertion “lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.” The virologist David Baltimore even told Wade that the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was “the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” (Baltimore later walked back his claim.)

As many scientists have since pointed out, the mere presence of the furin cleavage site is not dispositive of a Frankenstein experiment gone wrong. For example, the same genetic feature has come about, quite naturally and independently, in plenty of other, more distantly related coronaviruses, including those that cause the common cold. According to a “critical review” co-authored by 21 experts on viruses and viral evolution that was posted as a preprint in July, “simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain” the site’s presence in SARS-CoV-2, and “there is no logical reason” why it would look the way it does if it had been engineered inside a lab. “Further,” the authors wrote, “there is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”

But the apparent DARPA grant proposal complicates these arguments, at the very least. The engineering work that it describes would indeed involve such an artificial insertion. We don’t know whether that work was ever carried out—remember, DARPA rejected this proposal. Even if it had been, several experts told us, the genetic engineering would have happened at Ralph Baric’s lab in Chapel Hill, about 8,000 miles away from where the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak started. Yet now we know that the idea of inserting these sites was very much of interest to these research groups in the lead-up to the pandemic. “This is the first time they reveal that they are looking for these sites,” said Alina Chan, a scientist in Boston and a co-author of the forthcoming book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.

Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary virology at the University of Utah and one of the co-authors of the pandemic-origins critical review, considers it “unlikely” that any such work would have gone forward in Wuhan. It would be unusual—even unethical—for a lab in China to pursue experiments that were originally proposed by one of its collaborators in the United States, he told us. Another co-author of the critical review, the Johns Hopkins University microbiology postdoc Alex Crits-Christoph, interprets the proposal as stating that any novel cleavage sites would be inserted into a SARS-CoV-1-like coronavirus. Unless the Wuhan lab had already isolated a SARS-CoV-2-like virus that could carry this insertion—which Crits-Christoph doubts, given that it is not mentioned in the proposal—researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have had enough time between early 2018 and the fall of 2019 to construct (and then mistakenly release) the virus at the root of the pandemic.

Still, these scientists agree that the very fact that these experiments were even on the radar raises significant concerns. “I recognize this revelation opens up legitimate lines of questioning that are serious and need to be addressed by the people involved,” Goldstein told us via email. Crits-Christoph told us that it pushed the existing evidence “one step closer to the lab-engineering hypothesis”—but added that, given the improbable timeline, it moved things “one step further as well.”

With discussions of the lab-leak hypothesis being how they are, other scientists took a different point of view—one less skeptical of the idea that the experiments could have been carried out in China. Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist and expert in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, calls the timeline “plausible … certainly possible.” Chan points to other recent reports that the team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already been sampling very close relatives to SARS-CoV-2, and that it was testing, in humanized mice, genetically engineered SARS-like coronaviruses that were more infectious than natural strains. “WIV was fully outfitted to run all these experiments themselves,” she says.

Like we said before, this is all a big, confusing mess. Even if it is authentic, as it appears to be, the DARPA proposal does not prove the lab-leak hypothesis, nor does it come close to changing the consensus view that the pandemic probably started from a natural source.
Instead, what this week’s news really points to is how things got so messy in the first place—and it reminds us that things didn’t need to be this way. Why did this proposal have to be leaked by an anonymous whistleblower, in the form of a wonky PDF, to a group of amateur sleuths?

In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak ridiculed discussions of the furin cleavage site and whether it might be bioengineered as the ranting of conspiracy theorists. Six months later, Daszak was involved in two major, international investigations into the pandemic’s origins, organized by the World Health Organization and the British medical journal The Lancet. Now it appears that, just a few years earlier, he’d delivered a detailed grant proposal to the U.S. government, with himself as principal investigator, that described doing exactly that bioengineering work. “It’s just shocking,” Chan said.

The pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important information has been withheld. Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month delay, that describe experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and the U.S. government. (These experiments could not have led directly to the pandemic. A spokesperson for the NIH told The Intercept that the agency had reviewed data from the experiments and determined that they were not dangerous.) In June, Bloom, the Seattle computational biologist, discovered that several hundred genetic sequences drawn from very early COVID-19 patients had been mysteriously deleted from a public database. (They’ve since been restored.) Other facts that could be relevant to the origins debate have trickled out from obscure student work and other surprising sources.

Even as a natural origin remains the most plausible explanation, these discoveries, taken as a whole, demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that good-faith investigations of these matters have proceeded in the face of a toxic shroud of secrecy. Vaughn Cooper, who studies pathogen evolution at the University of Pittsburgh, told us that he hasn’t changed his view that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have been created in a lab—but the lack of candor is “really concerning.” The DARPA proposal doesn’t “mean that much for our understanding of the origins of the pandemic,” he said, “but it does diminish the trustworthiness of the research groups involved.”

“I find it disappointing and disturbing that something like this is coming out in the form of a leak,” Bloom said. “If there’s information that is relevant or informative to this discussion—anything that people could conceivably think is relevant—it needs to be made available.”

Until that happens, or unless that happens, the mess will only spread.