Now if you still think that it is more plausible that a wildlife infection or market animal with a BANAL like BatCoV made its way of all places to Wuhan (and nowhere else), without the help of such a research project, then good luck to you.
There is also something that baffles me here.
How come that the USAID / State Dep agreed to have these samples from Laos and other countries all sent to the WIV?
Come on! This is DURC and you use the WIV to process them all.
Is anybody watching?
And it fully breaks Callahan's basic rule for this kind of Cooperative Threat Reduction game:
>> One should always try to involve local labs and not just ship to a foreign lab (and certainly not China!) <<
This should force a serious downgrade of the market zoonotic origin.
=> The most direct - and correctly **exclusive** - link between a BANAL type specimen from a market or cave in Laos and Wuhan now goes via the WIV and EHA.
And it also allows for the presence of a BANAL type sample in Wuhan just at the right time, if one considers a lab accident, potentially as backbone for a chimera with a nasty spike.
Last, this proposal breaks the DURC CTR game rules - EHA is basically running wild.
EHA is not reducing the DURC risk but actually increasing it, by using Chinese and local teams to send market and wild caught bats samples directly to the WIV.
A grave mistake in the CTR game. That this could be allowed shows a total dereliction of duty from the supervisors.
Samples from Laos were sent to the WIV from June-17 to May-19 (years 4 and 5).
That email on page 60 basically says 'as we did with year-4, we would like again to collect samples in South East Asia (markets, caves, etc) and send them to the WIV for year 5 (to May 19)'.
It cannot have started before year 3, since EHA first asked to be able to send samples from Laos and other neighbours to China in that email below dated May 2016, at the time of the end of year-2 reporting (p.75-76).
The question is: Did they also ship South East Asian samples to the WIV in year 3 (June 16- May 17)?
The answer is very likely no based on p.70, p.80. p.101 and also based on the specific demand for Burma (p.84) [and despite B.6 aim on page 175]:
Also based on the answer for Burma (a more complex process due to USG sanctions), we can see that they would have likely targeted at least 4 samplings over the 2 years in Laos (p. 89).
Now if you want to understand why EHA decided to sample neighbouring countries in the middle of the grant, it all goes to the their observation of a reduction in the purchase of wildlife at wet markets in South-China and a shift to trade with other countries.
See page 181, 187:
Page 178 is interesting because is give the basic approach 'sample / check spike / create mutant' for both SARS and MERS:
I have not seen any paper under that R01 grant about the BatCoV samples from Laos and other neighboring countries sent to Wuhan.
- Why no paper?
- Can we see the sequences of the Laos BatCoVs sent to Wuhan?
In Sep 19, EHA published their findings about high-risk people in Southern China (including low seropositivity of 0.6%) covering work for years 2 to 4 (to Jul 17).
Letters which have not been made public (why?) but for which HHS arranged an 'in camera' review of printed copies by a bipartisan Committee, at HHS headquarters on Oct 5 and monitored by HHS staff.
See particularly pages 6 and 7:
What they show is how easily EHA argued that their research objectives did not constitute GoF, against the initial concerns of the NIH.
Let's get a few things clear about this declassified ODNI assessment (ODNI: Office of the Director of National Intelligence) : washingtonpost.com/national-secur…
First as is written on page 2:
"This assessment is based on information through August 2021."
In other words it does NOT include any information that has come up since the summary assessment of 26th Aug 21. dni.gov/index.php/news…
In particular it does not include the DEFUSE revelations (especially about the FCS).
Or the latest revelations that show that GoF on BatCoVs was indeed happening within the WIV.
It is based on data frozen in time - nothing new since the summary report: dni.gov/index.php/news…
It’s only over the last 15 years that BatCoVs have been extensively studied, and there were 6 primary cases of LAIs including one with community outbreak.
@BiophysicsFL@stuartjdneil@Ayjchan@TheSeeker268@R_H_Ebright@breakfast_dogs Not counting that outbreak because it was not a pandemic is based on another wrong generalisation: it’s only during the last few years that China was looking at enhanced pathogenicity of BatCoVs at scale using passaging or by building chimeras (you can date that to 2017).
The NIH tries to call it 'limited' and 'unexpected'.
[I won't go trough the details but it is not much unexepected as far as I can tell - it's a fully possible result that was being tested for here.]
That was part of year 5 reporting - officially submitted on the 3rd August 2021 according to the records.