Are people pushing the lab leak theory again?
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-06-26/u-s-government-debunks-covid-lab-leak-conspiracy-theory-enraging-conspiracy-theorists
The long-awaited report released Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put the lie to the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan, China, where the disease was first detected in humans.
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf
https://www.webmd.com/covid/coronavirus-history
The latest intelligence reports agree that the SARS-CoV-2 is not genetically engineered or developed as a biological weapon. They do say it is possible a version of a coronavirus was being studied with animals in a lab and exposure occurred there. Again, there is not enough evidence for a definitive conclusion.
Because the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in China, there has been a lot of anti-Asian speech and acts around the origins of SARS-CoV-2
It's always the timing that is suspicious, why now again.
But yes it could have happened from exposure while studying the virus, it has not been ruled out and an intermediary species has not been confirmed. The Pangolin was a good candidate but didn't fit in the end.
However it's not a genetically engineered bio weapon. It's not very effective at it, killing mostly elderly people and those with co morbidities. It hardly effected healthy younger people, those serving in armies... Standing 6' apart also does nothing for an airborne virus. That was all security theater without better ventilation. Same as masks only were 10% effective. Lock downs worked.
The theory that the research was done to get ahead of new out breaks is far more likely. Bio-weapons that attack your own as well, the whole world, who benefits from that? The only ones that benefited from the pandemic where pharmaceutical companies.
And not sure why you would call it humiliation of China, from your own linked article. If it was leaked from the lab, it was from research funded by the USA. Conveniently done in China, far away...
Because, by a strange twist in the story, her [Dr. Zheng-li Shi] work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money.
The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Dr. Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Dr. Shi. Here are extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. “CoV” stands for coronavirus and “S protein” refers to the virus’s spike protein.
“Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
“We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”
What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.
The USA knew what she was doing and funded the research.
If anything it's more humiliation for the USA. Exporting dangerous research to a cheaper location.
