Blistering Report Points To Peter Daszak As Being The Chief Architect Of Covid-19

Nicholas Wade's article was featured on Medium

Virologists like Dr. Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature. They argued they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural “spillovers,” the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people. If SARS2 had indeed escaped from such a laboratory experiment, a savage blowback could be expected, and the storm of public indignation would affect virologists everywhere, not just in China. “It would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom,” an MIT Technology Review editor, Antonio Regalado, said in March 2020.

A second statement which had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.

Unfortunately this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called “no-see-um” or “seamless” approaches, leave no defining marks. Nor do other methods for manipulating viruses such as serial passage, the repeated transfer of viruses from one culture of cells to another. If a virus has been manipulated, whether with a seamless method or by serial passage, there is no way of knowing that this is the case. Dr. Andersen and his colleagues were assuring their readers of something they could not know.

The discussion part their letter begins, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus”. But wait, didn’t the lead say the virus had clearly not been manipulated? The authors’ degree of certainty seemed to slip several notches when it came to laying out their reasoning.

The New York Post featured a condensed version of Nicholas Wade's findings:

In fact, if you brush away all the politics about the issue — Donald Trump said it came from a lab, therefore it can’t have — and look just at the scientific facts, a reasonably likely answer is buried there. I’ll try to explain what it is and sort out some of the consequences.

There are two theories about the origin of SARS2, as the virus can be called for short. One is that it jumped naturally from bats to people, as the SARS1 epidemic did in 2002. The other is that it escaped from an experiment in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s leading center of research on bat-type viruses.

The natural-emergence theory has long held the upper hand, in part because of strong statements made by virology experts from early on.    

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in The Lancet on Feb. 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened.