"An oversight board created to scrutinize research that would enhance highly dangerous pathogens did not review..NIH grant that funded..lab in Wuhan, China, to genetically modify bat-based coronaviruses."
"NIH subagency that awarded the grant to the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance to study Chinese bat coronaviruses opted against forwarding it to the P3CO committee"
"Had EcoHealth’s grant been subjected to P3CO review, an HHS panel would have independently evaluated the grant and, if necessary, recommended additional biocontainment measures to prevent potential lab leaks — or even recommended that the grant be denied entirely."
"This is a systemic problem...National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)— the subagency that funded EcoHealth—and..NIH have..systematically thwarted–indeed systematically nullified–the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review"
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"[T]he entire genre of research Redfield was referring to, known as gain-of-function research (in which viruses are captured from the wild and developed in lab settings to make them more dangerous), needs to be thoroughly reexamined."
"The world’s current plan to respond..entails a huge expansion of..this type of research. The $200 million program meant to 'predict' virus outbreaks is set to grow into a $1.2 billion Global Virome Project, which has the stated goal of discovering 500,000 new viruses"
"The plan is, having failed to predict and preempt[,] and having possibly triggered the current pandemic, to increase the scale six times"
Relman: "I would call it..superficial, skewed and incomplete..I'm struck by the fact that there are very few primary data..on which we can judge the kinds of assessments that are made, in some cases quite, quite enthusiastically"
Relman: "We can't simply dismiss one idea as very unlikely and hold another as very likely, when, in both cases, we have no direct evidence.
Secretary of State Blinken: "We have got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing..helped to write it."
"Determining the origin of..SARS-CoV-2..should have nothing to do with politics. It is a forensic question, one that requires thorough investigation of all possible theories"
"But a fatally flawed investigation by the World Health Organization and Chinese officials and experts only muddies the waters, and it places the WHO further at odds with the U.S. government and the Biden administration."
"The Chinese government received the report in advance and had tightly controlled the investigators’ visit to Wuhan, where the outbreak originated and where labs hold the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses."
"Let’s say, for instance that a Florida panther rampaged through the South Bronx, injuring many people. It would be immediately reasonable to wonder: How could that possibly happen? Florida panthers don’t live anywhere near the Bronx and aren’t normally so ferocious."
"WIV is around 10 miles from the site of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, whereas the natural coronavirus variants that most closely resemble SARS-CoV-2 come from a region in South West China more than 900 miles away."
"David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, says a lab leak was never the subject of a 'fair and dispassionate discussion of the facts as we know them.'"
"Relman agrees that in the absence of conclusive evidence, the message on origins should be 'we don’t know.'..[H]e found himself increasingly disheartened by those who..had seized on a spillover scenario, despite 'an amazing absence of data.'"
"[L]ab-release dangers are growing as well. The risk increases in proportion with the number of labs handling bioweapons and potential pandemic pathogens (more than 1,500 globally in 2010)..many of them, like the Wuhan lab, located in urban areas close to international airports."