The Congressional Select Subcommittee on the COVID pandemic has released its after-action report (520 pages). I’ve just begun to wade into it, but a few things immediately jump off the page. In the investigation of whether the Wuhan Flu was Zoonotic or a lab leak, the report lists five reasons why the lab leak scenario is more plausible.
Let me prepare you for how laughably obvious this sounds by saying it is laughably obvious.
The Wuhan Lab does this. It is staffed with coronavirus experts and, well…this (footnote ref. removed).
[I]n 2018, a year before the outbreak, EcoHealth, in partnership with the WIV, in a grant application to DARPA proposed to create a virus with SARS-CoV-2’s defining features. In their application to DARPA, EcoHealth and its WIV partners stated their intent to create a SARS-like virus with a furin cleavage site, which is the exact same feature that made humans susceptible to COVID-19 infection.
Someone wanted to make this exact virus, the one that raced across the world, with a distinctly different characteristic from any other known Conronavirus, from two paragraphs previous (footnote ref. removed).
Mr. Wade astutely noted that “SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site, found in none of the other 871 known members of its viral family, so it cannot have gained such a site through the ordinary evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family.” With the natural evolution of a furin cleavage site being nonexistent, Mr. Wade further noted that EcoHealth and the WIV’s DEFUSE proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, sought to do what nature had not been ever known to do —insert a furin cleavage site into a SARS2 virus. It is, therefore, more than just a coincidence that COVID-19 emerged from the city with a lab preparing to conduct this research under cost-effective yet risky BSL-2 protocols.
Wait, there’s more.
- [I]n a draft proposal for the grant to DARPA, Dr. Daszak acknowledged that some of the SARS-CoV-2 research would be conducted at BSL-2 at the WIV.
- [T]he WIV has a track record of engaging in this type of airborne viral research under low biosafety conditions.
- [A]t the WIV, it was known that Chinese researchers conducted this type of research under BSL-2 protocols, which do not require masking at all times and involve less protective equipment.2
SARS2 was genetically different, identical to a planned gain-of-function design project at WIV, and developed in a lab where a contagious virus could be carried out by anyone in the lab who came into contact with it.
Lab leak?
[T]he evidence supporting that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is tenuous. Dr. Chan points of that “the existing genetic and early case data show that all known COVID-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.” Furthermore, no infected animal has been verified at the Wuhan market or its supply chain.
Animal rights folks will be happy. There is no evidence that people gave it to animals in Wuhan or the other way around.
Lab Leak.
There is no need to apologize for this. We knew we were right. And there are plenty of other things that deserve an apology, and they are probably in the report, some of which are (sort of summed up in this tweet).
The report itself is 520 pages, including thirty-some-plus preface pages on who was interviewed and so on. It may take a while to wade through, so we might borrow someone else’s ‘look’ in a future update (with credit, of course). But I expect to find a few more bright spots to feature, so check back.
