{"id":3036,"date":"2021-09-26T21:07:01","date_gmt":"2021-09-26T21:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=3036"},"modified":"2021-09-26T21:07:01","modified_gmt":"2021-09-26T21:07:01","slug":"the-lab-leak-debate-just-got-even-messier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=3036","title":{"rendered":"The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Authors: Daniel Engber  1 day ago<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>Like<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that in the likeliest scenario SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally<\/em>, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease.https:\/\/products.gobankingrates.com\/pub\/4676bc08-11ad-4872-8fef-ffbda36ebb37?targeting[keyword]=news-tech<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest piece of evidence came out<\/a> this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one<\/a> purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected<\/a>), for a $14.2 million project aimed at \u201cdefusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.\u201d Released<\/a> earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC<\/a>, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The document seems almost tailor-made to buttress one specific theory of a laboratory origin: that SARS-CoV-2 wasn\u2019t simply brought into a lab by scientists and then released by accident, but rather pieced together in a deliberate fashion. In fact, the work described in the proposal fits so well into that narrative of a \u201cgain-of-function<\/a> experiment gone wrong\u201d that some wondered if it might be too good to be true<\/a>. Central figures in the coronavirus-origins debate were involved: Among Daszak\u2019s listed partners on the grant were Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an American virologist known for doing coronavirus gain-of-function studies in his lab, and Shi Zhengli, the renowned virus hunter from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Shi Zhengli has not responded to a request for comment. A UNC spokesperson responded on behalf of Baric, noting that \u201cthe grant applicant and DARPA are best positioned to explain the proposal.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is good reason to believe the document is genuine. The Atlantic<\/em> has confirmed that a grant proposal with the same identifying number and co-investigators was submitted to DARPA in 2018. The proposal that circulated online includes an ambitious scheme to inoculate wild bats against coronaviruses, carried out in concert with the National Wildlife Health Center, a research lab in Wisconsin. A spokesperson for the U.S. Geological Survey, which oversees the center, acknowledged this connection and affirmed the identifying number and co-investigators, noting that the agency\u2019s involvement in the project ended with DARPA\u2019s rejection of the grant proposal. \u201cThis is the proposal that was not funded,\u201d USGS Acting Public Affairs Chief Rachel Pawlitz said after reviewing the PDF. She could not, however, vouch for the document in its entirety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jared Adams, DARPA\u2019s chief of communications, said in an emailed statement that the agency was not at liberty to discuss proposals submitted as part of its emerging-pathogenic-threat program, which was launched in January 2018, and that DARPA has never funded \u201cany activity or researcher associated with EcoHealth Alliance or Wuhan Institute of Virology.\u201d An article<\/a> about the proposal published yesterday in The Intercept<\/em> points to a tweet<\/a> by Daszak last weekend, before the PDF was widely shared, that refers obliquely to the release of unfunded grant proposals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For anyone looking for the great, final vindication of the lab-leak hypothesis, this document will leave you wanting. Does the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have an unnatural origin? The answer hasn\u2019t changed: probably not. But we have learned something quite disturbing in the past few days, simply from how and when this information came to light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pandemic-origins debate is a big, confusing mess<\/a>\u2014but it\u2019s an important mess<\/a>, so bear with us. The hottest news in the leaked proposal concerns the researcher\u2019s plan to sift through a large trove of genomic-sequence data drawn from samples of bat blood, feces, and other fluids, in search of (among other things) new kinds of \u201cfurin cleavage sites.\u201d When these are encoded into just the right spot on the spike protein of a coronavirus, they allow that spike to be opened up by an enzyme found in human cells. According to the proposal, \u201chigh-risk\u201d versions of these sites, once identified, would then be introduced via genetic engineering into SARS-like coronaviruses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why does this matter? We\u2019ve long known that the presence of such a site in SARS-CoV-2 increased<\/a> its pathogenic power, and we also know that similar features have not<\/em> been found in any other SARS-like coronavirus (though we may find them in the future). For lab-leak proponents, these facts\u2014combined with certain details of the furin cleavage site\u2019s structure\u2014strongly hint at human intervention. As the science journalist Nicholas Wade argued in an influential lab-leak-theory brief last spring, this genetic insertion \u201clies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from<\/a>.\u201d The virologist David Baltimore even told Wade that the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was \u201cthe smoking gun for the origin of the virus.\u201d (Baltimore later walked back<\/a> his claim.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As many scientists have since pointed out, the mere presence of the furin cleavage site is not dispositive of a Frankenstein experiment gone wrong. For example, the same genetic feature<\/a> has come about, quite naturally and independently, in plenty of other, more distantly related coronaviruses, including those that cause the common cold. According to a \u201ccritical review\u201d<\/a> co-authored by 21 experts on viruses and viral evolution that was posted as a preprint in July, \u201csimple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain\u201d the site\u2019s presence in SARS-CoV-2, and \u201cthere is no logical reason\u201d why it would look the way it does if it had been engineered inside a lab. \u201cFurther,\u201d the authors wrote, \u201cthere is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Authors: Daniel Engber  1 day agoLike As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[171,375],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fda","category-news-of-the-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}