“This shouldn’t happen”: Inside the virus-hunting nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance

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Some points I found interesting:<p>- Kristian Andersen offered to abuse his power as editor to stealthily edit a preprint. He is the main author of the most notable paper supporting a natural origin, and has been one of the major resources of the natural origins camp. Now his scientific integrity is seriously questioned.<p>- Peter Daszak appears much more focused on finding new sources of grant money than on doing good science: &quot;What was needed, he exhorted his staff, was a “change in culture” as “part of [a] mentaility [sic] to get money,”<p>- The Wuhan Institute of Virology is more of a second zone lab than a top lab: &quot;The WIV was also viewed as subpar, especially when compared with the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute. Harbin was China’s Harvard, said the former DARPA official. The WIV was more like a safety school&quot;<p>- EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak were seen by DARPA as amateurs in virology, not at all the expert frontline organisation that&#x27;s been suggested before: &quot;EcoHealth Alliance was viewed as a “ragtag group” and a “middle guy,” a backseat collaborator willing to get on an Air China jet, eat terrible food, and stay in bad hotels&quot; &quot;EcoHealth Alliance had “bolted on” a serious scientist, Ralph Baric&quot;.

&gt;The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?<p>Wait what?! Is this new information ? Because this is incredibly troubling

A lot of this is tough to evaluate as a lay person. For example:<p>&gt;From the 75-page proposal, a striking detail stood out: a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells.<p>&gt;A furin cleavage site is a spot in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. SARS-CoV-2, which emerged more than a year after the DARPA grant was submitted, is notable among SARS-like coronaviruses for having a unique furin cleavage site. This anomaly has led some scientists to consider whether the virus could have emerged from laboratory work gone awry.<p>Should I interpret it as a would-be unbelievable coincidence that they would be working on the very same furin cleavage site that is unique in CoV-2? Or should I interpret it as obvious - maybe the furin cleavage site is the most important part for infectiousness, and so we should expect any new human-infecting virus to have changes there, and should also expect that to be the area scientists focus on.<p>Without expert knowledge, I have no way to tell, but it feels like the sort of thing I could very easily interpret incorrectly one way or the other.

I just sincerely hope that people remember that the subject of this article was “banned” from all media and social media as recent as 1.5 yrs ago. People got deplatformed and cancelled. And now it turns out to be true. What can we learn from this going forward?

<i>&gt; In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.</i><p>Wow.

&gt; Presumably, Daszak possessed a great deal of that inaccessible data. He said as much during a March 2021 panel organized by a London-based think tank: “A lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases.” Previously, EcoHealth Alliance had signed a pledge, along with 57 other scientific and medical organizations, to share data promptly in the event of a global public health emergency. And yet, in the face of just such an emergency, Daszak told Nature magazine, “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”<p>Even if they fucked up by committing a legitimate mistake doing honest work, the cover-up is a legit conspiracy and downright criminal.

&gt; Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had urged Fauci privately to vigorously investigate both the lab and natural hypotheses. He was then excluded from the ensuing discussions—learning only later that they’d even occurred. “Their goal was to have a single narrative,” Redfield told Vanity Fair.<p>Wow

The Intercept has published a whole series of articles on this topic, which include leaked emails from people involved: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;collections&#x2F;origins-of-covid&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;collections&#x2F;origins-of-covid&#x2F;</a><p>This article from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is also candid and informative: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asbmb.org&#x2F;asbmb-today&#x2F;policy&#x2F;112121&#x2F;gain-of-function-research-all-in-the-eye-of-the-be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asbmb.org&#x2F;asbmb-today&#x2F;policy&#x2F;112121&#x2F;gain-of-func...</a><p>There are also clips out there of Ralph Baric talking openly about making modified viruses (can&#x27;t find it now but I believe he mentions it casually in passing in this lecture: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BE_H7dTqJXU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BE_H7dTqJXU</a> ).<p>I guess I get why these researchers are so cagey about sharing in simple terms what they do. The facts have a huge potential to be twisted and weaponized politically in this situation, and I&#x27;m sure the rationale for the research is very complicated.<p>That said in my opinion there needs to be transparency around these kinds of incredibly risky ecological engineering projects.<p>Another thing,&quot;self-disseminating vaccines&quot;: there are researchers who propose the creation and release of engineered viruses in animal populations adjacent to people (to prevent pandemics with zoonotic origins of course!):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41559-020-1254-y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41559-020-1254-y</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?q=self-disseminating+vaccines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?q=self-disseminating+vacc...</a><p>It&#x27;s hard to ignore the double edged sword of research like this though. Is there any question that this &quot;biosecurity&quot; technology has inherently troublesome uses as bioweaponry? The potential for sabotage by misanthropic &#x2F; malthusian actors is also really unsettling. The game theory involved is probably really gnarly and I can only wonder what twisted offspring of mutually assured destruction intelligence agencies are using to grapple with this stuff, and to rationalize this kind of research.<p>During the cold war there was a kind of presumption that every life is worth protecting. Unfortunately I have a feeling that with the reality of climate change this belief is not as universal as it once was. I worry that it&#x27;s quite common for people in positions of power to have Malthusian beliefs about overpopulation and stuff in the face of climate change.<p>(To be clear, I&#x27;m not in any way suggesting covid-19 was intentionally released as a tool of depopulation. I&#x27;m making a point about the game theory that has so far prevented nuclear catastrophe... I have trouble seeing what holds it together under the normalization of ethical frameworks that see depopulation as necessary, and wondering how that factors into the chess games that governments, defense agencies and their propagandists are playing right now...)

Another interesting tidbit I&#x27;d never heard:<p><i>&gt; And in September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests.</i>

While a good article, the evidence it presents has mostly already been known. What is very interesting, however, is that a publication as mainstream as Vanity Fair is publishing such an article. That, is new, as far as I know.

Some of the collateral damage from COVID-19:<p>&quot;COVID-19: Schools for more than 168 million children globally have been completely closed for almost a full year, says UNICEF&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicef.org&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;schools-more-168-million-children-globally-have-been-completely-closed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicef.org&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;schools-more-168-milli...</a><p>&quot;30-40 percent of minority and low-income students weren’t learning during lockdowns&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mckinsey.com&#x2F;featured-insights&#x2F;coronavirus-leading-through-the-crisis&#x2F;charting-the-path-to-the-next-normal&#x2F;30-to-40-percent-of-minority-and-low-income-students-werent-learning-during-lockdowns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mckinsey.com&#x2F;featured-insights&#x2F;coronavirus-leadi...</a><p>&quot;We find that the pandemic led to 97 million more people being in poverty in 2020.&quot; - World Bank<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.worldbank.org&#x2F;opendata&#x2F;updated-estimates-impact-covid-19-global-poverty-turning-corner-pandemic-2021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.worldbank.org&#x2F;opendata&#x2F;updated-estimates-impac...</a><p>&quot;Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19 years, the rate of body mass index (BMI) increase approximately doubled during the pandemic compared to a prepandemic period. Persons with prepandemic overweight or obesity and younger school-aged children experienced the largest increases.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;mmwr&#x2F;volumes&#x2F;70&#x2F;wr&#x2F;mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm7037a3_w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;mmwr&#x2F;volumes&#x2F;70&#x2F;wr&#x2F;mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...</a><p>&quot;Covid-19: Children born during the pandemic score lower on cognitive tests, study finds&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bmj.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;374&#x2F;bmj.n2031" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bmj.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;374&#x2F;bmj.n2031</a><p>And the civil liberties of literally billions of people were curtailed. Just India and China, which both imposed severe lockdowns, collectively have a population of 2.8 billion.<p>In Canada, thousands of people were locked in their room in their last year of their life:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;canada&#x2F;toronto&#x2F;long-term-care-covid-confinement-1.5969825" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;canada&#x2F;toronto&#x2F;long-term-care-covid-...</a>

&gt; Everyone is looking for a smoking gun<p>It appears the analogy is lost on most people. &quot;Smoking gun&quot; evidence would not be some kind of absolute proof of the virus origins. The whole point of the analogy is that if you find the just-fired gun, and a gunshot victim, you don&#x27;t need to have seen the actual shot to deduce what happened and with what weapon. In the case of COVID-19, the smoking gun would be the virology lab down the street from the virus epicenter. Of course, smoking guns are rebuttable: there&#x27;s the possibility that another weapon was involved and all the evidence vanished. But you can&#x27;t consistently say that there&#x27;s a smoking gun and yet we lack sufficient evidence. At this point there <i>is</i> sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion, and all that remains is to weigh it.

In the absence of any concrete scientific evidence for a lab leak (and an enormous amount of real, arguably dispositive, evidence against it), I see this doubling-down of articles attacking the character of anyone peripherally involved in work on coronaviruses. There&#x27;s nothing at all new here.<p>A lot of people weren&#x27;t even on this site back then... but this is exactly like watching the &quot;ClimateGate&quot; scandal play out here on HN over a decade ago, and in fact even involves some of the key players like Matt Ridley! Now, over a decade later, it turns out some messy dendrochronological paleoclimatology did not in fact represent a conspiracy invalidating the entirety of climate research and global warming is an even clearer threat.<p>In another decade we&#x27;re going to have a much better understanding of horseshoe bats, asian animal markets, and coronavirus evolution... and not a single one of the breathless accusers involved in these screeds will ever apologize for flogging conspiracy.<p>Yeah, science is messy, scientists are flawed humans, desperate for money and generally terrified of bad PR and the mob. But the entirety of viral reverse genetics can&#x27;t be thrown into an ill-defined &quot;GOF&quot; bucket. What constitutes acceptable risk and GOF in these areas has been an active debate in virology for as long as I can remember, and the quality of this dialogue is not going to be aided by this circus.

&gt; If the Chinese scientists wanted to delete their sequences from the database, which NIH policy entitled them to do, it was unethical for Bloom to analyze them further, he claimed.<p>It&#x27;s unethical to do things just because China doesn&#x27;t want you to do them?

My occam&#x27;s razor thoughts. Most bad viri have origins from humans using animals for food. Aids from bushmeat, 1918 pandemic is thought to be from birds, same with the common flu. Just look at the latest bird flu sweeping the world, this one isn&#x27;t affecting humans, but yet another pandemic from raising animals for food.<p>Most people want to blame a lab, but the obvious answer is more likely imo.

I think it&#x27;s important that we <i>don&#x27;t, in under any circumstances</i> seek punishment here (if there are culprits). This is too politically charged and complex for that. But we can work to make sure this doesn&#x27;t happen again (it could be worse next time).

IMVHO discover the real origin is just a game, we simply can&#x27;t. What we can instead and the classic cui prodest (who gain) from covid, who pay for it.<p>Please remember a thing: there are thing that can&#x27;t be really know, even if someone tell the real truth we can&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s true or not. While there are other things that can&#x27;t really be hidden that much, banally by their size, we can&#x27;t know them at the smallest details perhaps, but we can know enough.<p>Like we read about &quot;a soldier kill a journalist in a certain place&quot;, we can&#x27;t really know if it&#x27;s true, if the killer was a soldier and one of witch side etc, even if the real truth is published, even with a non-tempered video of the action appear etc. But we can know that there is a war, that&#x27;s can&#x27;t really be hidden or mocked up in the modern world. Again we can&#x27;t really know what&#x27;s up in that war but war but we can speculate (in the Latin sense, witch means exploring) who profit, who want what etc.<p>For covid it&#x27;s not different. We can&#x27;t really know it&#x27;s origin, it&#x27;s real effects etc, but we can know who profit, and who loose. That&#x27;s enough to act. The fact that:<p>- covid is natural<p>- covid is an artificially modified virus leaked from a lab<p>- covid is leaked by accident vs on purpose<p>- ...<p>does not really matter. What it matter is that &quot;thanks to covid&quot; our western world is far more similar to China after it. That big of IT, between those who have founded covid propaganda, research etc, are between the biggest earners from covid, like big pharma. That&#x27;s matter because that&#x27;s not just &quot;good business&quot; form them but a crime. The fact that such crime was crafted on purpose, to what extent, just ridden at the right time does not really makes much differences. Morally, politically, ... it makes big differences but since we can&#x27;t know that for sure it does not matter, the effects are still the same, and those are what it matter.<p>Learning this is crucial to be part of a society. We can&#x27;t know anything, we should master the uncertain part, we can&#x27;t measure anything, we should master the art of &quot;loose tolerance&quot; etc. The society, the reality is not a computer program, imperative style, we can know just reading source code, it&#x27;s level of complexity is just too big, and that does not means we can&#x27;t know anything.

&gt; Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a short drive from the WIV itself.<p>There is another building few hundred yards from the market but if you mention this on HN your comment gets flagged (probably by Chinese bots).

Thats cool. Should be my next diy project.

After reading this article, it seems that it&#x27;s much more likely than not that the virus has lab origins. That is crazy, but what&#x27;s more interesting is how interconnected all the players in this space are. Trump often referred to the virus as the &quot;Chinese Virus&quot; due to his view that the virus originated from the WIV. While it does appear likely that the virus originated in China, it turns out an NIH-funded U.S. NGO was also highly involved?<p>Also troubling are minor details not really related to the main lab-origin theory presented in this article:<p>&gt; In 2011, two scientists separately announced that they had genetically altered Highly Pathogenic Asian Avian Influenza A (H5N1), the bird flu virus that has killed at least 456 people since 2003. The scientists gave the virus new functions—enabling it to spread efficiently among ferrets, which are genetically closer to humans than mice—as a way to gauge its risks to people. Both studies had received NIH funding.<p>I&#x27;m not saying the NIH is directly responsible for these programs, but it seems prudent to cut back on deadly virus creation.

It’s fucking embarrassing that humanity hasn’t held Peter Daszak and his ilk to account for their consistent lies about the pandemic.<p>These people should be named, shamed and shunned, and at the very least, be legally prevented from working with anything vaguely related to biology.

Is it any surprise meetings around this topic are contentions?<p>Fauci was receiving credible death threats and even on this topic thread here there are a number of dead comments with comments similar to (and I quote): <i>Fauci must be executed for us to move forward.</i><p>The idea that people voice approval for executing people they disagree with is so repugnant and contrary to the idea of civil discourse I don&#x27;t find it surprising people start yelling in science meetings about the topic.

I am not usually much of a conspiracy theorist but the giant bioweapons lab explosion in eastern Russia (accidentally caused by huge fires in Siberia) somewhere around November of 2019 always seemed a bit suspect considering the timing. I have not seen anyone else talk or theorize about this at all but given it was the same lab that ended up developing their Covid19 vaccine it seems (maybe) plausible that a virus was leaked during that time.<p>The only other person I found talking about this admittedly far fetched theory was a random Russian comedian - he made some jokes about it and the Russian government IMMEDIATELY came down super hard on him and he had take it all down.

Has anyone else looked into the things that former EcoHealth Alliance executive Dr. Andrew G. Huff (@aghuff on Twitter) has been saying since October? I am surprised that this article doesn’t even mention him, despite the fact that he worked at EHA for some of the years in question.