Thread by @mi6rogue

The #WuhanLabLeak isn’t the predominant hypothesis for Covid’s origins, yet prominent scientists are calling for a deeper probe and clearer answers from Beijing on the origins of #COVID19. The CIA has claimed Lab workers were sick with #coronavirus during November 2019...

DANAOSHAN, China On the outskirts of a village deep in the mountains of southwest China, alone surveillance camera peers down toward a disused copper mine smothered in dense bamboo. As night approaches, bats swoop overhead...

This is the subterranean home of the closest known virus on Earth to the one that causes Covid-19. It is also now a touchpoint for escalating calls for a more thorough probe into whether the pandemic could have stemmed from a Chinese laboratory...

In April 2012, six miners here fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mine to clear bat guano. Three of them died. Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were called in to investigate and, after taking samples from bats in the mine...

identified several new coronaviruses. Now, unanswered questions about the miners’ illness, the viruses found at the site and the research done with them have elevated into the mainstream an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory...

that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the city where the first cases were found in December 2019. The lab researchers thus far haven’t provided full and prompt answers, and there have been discrepancies in some information...

they have released. That has led to demands by leading scientists for a deeper investigation into the Wuhan institute and whether the pandemic virus could have been in its labs and escaped...

Senior public-health officials who consider that possibility improbable now back the idea of a fuller probe. They say a World Health Organization-led team had insufficient access in Wuhan earlier this year to reach its conclusion that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”...

Most of those calling for a fuller examination of the lab hypothesis say they aren’t backing it over the main alternative—that the virus spread from animals to humans outside a lab, in the kind of natural spillover that has become more frequent in recent decades...

There isn’t yet enough evidence for either idea, they say, nor are the two incompatible. The virus could have been one of natural origin that was brought back to a laboratory in Wuhan—intentionally or accidentally—and escaped...

A growing number, however, including the director-general of the WHO and a prominent U.S. researcher who has worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, agree that the WIV needs to provide more information about its work to categorically rule out a lab spill...

Three WIV researchers became ill enough in November 2019 that they sought local hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report, though officials expressed differing views over the strength of the evidence...

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Monday the information came from a foreign entity, and that the U.S. needed additional information to independently verify it. In January, the US State Department had said that several WIV researchers became sick in autumn 2019...

The Biden administration has recommended to the WHO that it lead a fuller investigation into the possibility of a lab leak, backing a call by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who has offered to deploy specialists...

An investigation should include other laboratories in Wuhan, not just the WIV, and the team conducting it should include laboratory safety experts, according to a U.S. health official. “We should be able to look at biosafety records and interview staff members,”...

Asked in a May 11 Senate hearing whether he thought the Covid-19 virus might have escaped from a Wuhan lab, Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said, “That possibility certainly exists"...

“I’m convinced that what happened is that the virus was brought to a lab, they started to work with it…and some sloppy individual brought it out,” said Bernard Roizman, a University of Chicago virologist...

Ralph Baric, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina who worked with the WIV on a study to create an artificial coronavirus that infected human cells in the lab...

The shift among leading scientists is partly due to conflicting statements from Chinese researchers. Some scientists say another factor has been a toning down of U.S. government rhetoric on the subject in recent months...

The WHO team, which spent three hours at the institute, had little to go on beyond assurances from the institute’s own staff, team members say. On the same day the report was released, Dr Tedros said the team hadn’t adequately explored a potential lab origin...

Scientists question why the WHO-led team, which has sought to investigate clues to the pandemic’s origins in other countries such as Italy, hasn’t been able to arrange antibody tests of people around the overgrown mine that held the virus most closely related to SARS-CoV-2...

The team has recommended such research, but the “timeline is still, still not clear,” said Peter Ben Embarek, the food-safety scientist who led the team. “Ideally, starting soon.”...

The most detailed account of the miners’ illness comes in a master’s thesis by Li Xu from the No. 1 School of Clinical Medicine at Kunming Medical University in southwest China. He didn’t respond to requests for comment...

His thesis, how a 42-year-old man surnamed Lü was admitted there on April 25, 2012. Mr Lü had been clearing bat guano at the mine, in China’s Mojiang region, since April 2 and had suffered from a fever and cough for two weeks...

For the previous three days, he had trouble breathing and had begun coughing up rust-colour mucus spotted with blood. A CT scan revealed severe pneumonia, with the same lung markings now seen in many Covid-19 patients. Still, blood and other tests couldn’t pinpoint the cause...

Over the next week, five others working at the Mojiang mine, ages 30 to 63, were admitted to the same hospital. All had similar symptoms. Doctors consulted experts in respiratory disease, including Zhong Nanshan, who had led the fight against...

China’s 2002 & 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Dr Zhong diagnosed pneumonia, most likely caused by a virus, and recommended testing for SARS antibodies and trying to identify the type of bats in the mine. He didn’t respond to a request for comment...

Another thesis, written by a PHD candidate supervised by George Gao, the current head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, or China CDC, said four of the miners tested positive for SARS antibodies...

The hospital contacted experts from several other institutions, including the WIV. None could identify what caused the miners’ illness. By mid-August 2012, three of them were dead...

The suspicion was that it was a bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus, according to Mr Li’s thesis. Chinese scientists, who were still searching for the origins of SARS, knew that bat caves in the area were a potential source, and they had been collecting samples from them...

Over the next year or so, WIV scientists entered the Mojiang mine and took faecal samples from 276 bats, identifying six different species, according to a research paper they published later...

They extracted genetic material from the samples and sequenced fragments. Half of the samples tested positive for coronaviruses, including an unidentified strain of a SARS-like one, according to the scientists. They called the virus RaBtCoV/...

All six bat species showed evidence of coronavirus co-infection, the researchers found the virus could easily exchange genetic material with similar ones to create a new coronavirus—an environment ripe for the creation of new viruses that could potentially infect humans...

That research was led by Shi Zhengli, the WIV’s leading bat coronavirus expert. When the results were published in 2016 in the journal Virologica Sinica, few scientists paid attention to RaBtCoV/4991. It didn’t appear to be closely related to SARS...

It came from an abandoned mineshaft, said the paper, which made no mention of the miners who fell sick there. Only after the Covid-19 pandemic began did it become more significant. In February 2020, Dr Shi and her colleagues published a paper in the scientific journal...

Nature, revealing the existence of a virus called RaTG13. Sequencing had revealed it was 96.2% similar to SARS-CoV-2 genetically, making it the closest known relative to the pandemic virus. They said it was found in a bat in Yunnan, the Chinese province that includes the...

Mojiang region mine, but didn’t say when or where. That revelation was considered a breakthrough in the search for Covid-19’s source, strongly indicating that it originated in bats...

In the following weeks, however, some scientists outside China noticed striking similarities in the sampling dates and partial genetic sequences of the virus called RaTG13 and the one called RaBtCoV/4991, which Dr Shi’s team had found in the Mojiang mine...

After repeated requests by scientists to clarify the issue, Dr Shi said that the two viruses were one and the same. She updated her paper in Nature in November to reflect that and include details about the sick miners...

The virus had been renamed to reflect the bat species, its location, and the sampling year, she said. She also revealed that the WIV retested samples from the miners and established that they weren’t infected with SARS-CoV-2...

She disclosed that her team subsequently had found eight other SARS-type coronaviruses in the mine. On Friday, after repeated requests from scientists to share the genetic sequences of the viruses, Dr Shi and colleagues released a scientific paper on a preprint server...

meaning that it has yet to be peer-reviewed. The paper said the eight were almost identical to each other and only 77.6% similar to SARS-CoV-2, although one part of their genetic code was a 97.2% match...

“Albeit there is a speculation claiming the possible leaking of RaTG13 from the lab that caused SARS-CoV-2, the experimental evidence cannot support it,” the paper said...

Many scientists question why the WIV didn’t announce the existence of those viruses earlier, as well as their connection to the mine, and why they waited so long to allow scientists to examine their sequences...

Such information about the types of coronaviruses that were circulating is critical in the search for the pandemic’s origins, they say. Some have noted that Dr Shi has repeatedly asserted that the Mojiang miners had a suspected fungal infection, not a virus...

contradicting research papers at the time and Dr Shi’s update in Nature, which said the miners were thought to have a virus...

Many scientists are eager to examine the WIV’s once publicly available database of some 22,000 samples and virus sequences, including 15,000 from bats. The database was taken offline in September 2019...

Dr Shi told the WHO-led team in February that the database was taken offline after being subjected to more than 3,000 cyberattacks. The WHO-led team that visited didn’t ask to view the data, according to Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance...

The database included information the WIV had gathered through work with EcoHealth Alliance, which was funded by the NIAID and collaborated with the WIV to study coronaviruses in bats. Dr Daszak said earlier this year that because of his organization’s work with the WIV...

“We basically know” what viruses were in the database, and none was closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13. Moreover, RaTG13 was genetically very distinct from SARS-CoV-2 and had never been successfully cultured in the lab, he and other scientists on the WHO-led team said...

“Of course we discussed it,” said Dr Ben Embarek, the WHO team leader. “From what we know, only a sequence exists. No virus. They never succeeded in culture a virus out of the bat faeces sample.”...

WIV had only the genetic sequence, it wouldn’t have had an infectious RaTg13 virus that could have escaped. Having only the genetic sequence also raises questions about the extent to which it could have been used as the basis for experiments to create man-made viruses...

Other scientists, however, say that cannot be independently verified without viewing the WIV’s lab logs, sample records and viral database and that research papers show its employees were combining some bat coronaviruses they had cultured with genetic material from others...

Some are uncomfortable with Dr Daszak’s role in the WHO-led team, given his close relationship with the WIV and his stated rejection of the lab hypothesis. Dr Daszak has said he provided a conflict of interest statement to the WHO when he applied to be on the team...

The WHO has said it determined his work didn’t pose a conflict. One area of controversy is the experiments the WIV was doing to construct new viruses by combining elements of existing bat coronaviruses to determine whether they could become more infectious to humans...