Vanity Fair | Lab Leaks Says: The Inside Story of the COVID-19 Origin Investigation (2/2)

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19's Origins

Author: Katherine Eban

Original link: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins

Table of contents:

I. A group called DRASTIC

II. "A Can Full of Worms"

III. "Appears to be a deliberate cover-up"

IV. "Antibody Response"

V. "Too much risk and should not continue"

VI. People who pay attention to details

VII. Miners of Mojiang

VIII. The Gain-of-Function Controversy

IX. Memo Showdown

X. Investigation team to Wuhan

XI. Inside the Virology Institute

XII. Out of the Shadows

VII. Miners of Mojiang

In 2012, in the verdant mountains of Mojiang county in southern Yunnan province, six miners were assigned the daunting task of removing a thick layer of bat guano from the mine floor. After being exposed to bat droppings for weeks, the miners fell seriously ill and were sent to the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University in the Yunnan capital. Their symptoms of coughing, fever and difficulty breathing sounded alarm bells in a country that had a SARS outbreak a decade ago.

The hospital has brought in Zhong Nanshan, a pulmonologist who has played an important role in treating SARS patients and will lead the China National Health Commission's COVID-19 expert team in the future. According to that 2013 master's thesis, Zhong Nanshan immediately suspected that the miners' disease was caused by a virus infection. He suggested throat culture and antibody testing, but he also asked what kind of bat was producing the feces. The answer is: Chinese chrysanthemum bat, the same species involved in the first SARS outbreak.

Within months, three of the six miners died. The first to die was the eldest, a 63-year-old man. "The disease was acute and violent," the paper said, and concluded that "the bat that sickened the six patients was the Chinese chrysanthemum bat." The miners' blood samples were sent to Wuhan virus The Institute of Science, which later found them to be positive for SARS antibodies, according to a later Chinese paper.

But the diagnosis brought new mysteries. Scientists had previously believed that bat coronaviruses would not harm humans. How are the strains in the cave different? To find out, research teams from across China came to the abandoned mine to collect virus samples from bats, ferrets and mice.

In research published in the journal Nature in October 2013, Zhengli Shi reported a key finding: Some bat viruses do not need to jump to intermediate animals first, but have the potential to infect humans directly. After first isolating a live SARS-like bat coronavirus, her team found that it can enter human cells through a protein called the ACE2 receptor.

In follow-up studies in 2014 and 2016, Shi and her colleagues continued to study bat virus samples collected from mines, hoping to find out which virus infected the miners. Bats carry a variety of coronaviruses. But only one virus has a very similar genome to SARS. The researchers named it RaBtCoV/4991.

On February 3, 2020, at a time when the COVID-19 outbreak had spread beyond China, Shi Zhengli and several colleagues published a paper showing that the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the 2002 outbreak. The genetic code of CoVs is nearly 80% identical. But they also reported that SARS-CoV-2 was 96.2% identical in sequence to a coronavirus they had known as RaTG13, which had been detected in Yunnan province. They concluded that RaTG13 is the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2.

In the months that followed, as researchers around the world searched for all known bat viruses that could be precursors to SARS-CoV-2, Shi Zhengli provided constant changes on the origin of RaTG13 and when it was fully sequenced, And often contradictory statements. By searching a public repository of gene sequences, several teams, including DRASTIC, quickly realized that RaTG13 looked identical to RaBtCoV/4991 — the virus from a cave that caused miners to contract a disease similar to COVID-19 in 2012.

In July, as questions from all walks of life continued to accumulate, Shi Zhengli told Science that her lab had renamed the sample for clarity of classification. But to skeptics, the practice looks like an effort to disguise the sample's connection to the Mojiang mine.

Over the next month, investigators' doubts multiplied when Shi, Daszak and their colleagues published their report on 630 novel coronaviruses they sampled between 2010 and 2015. When combing through the supplementary data, DRASTIC researchers were shocked to find that eight other viruses closely related to RaTG13 were also collected in the Mojiang mining area, but none of them were identified in the report. Elena Chen of the Broad Institute said it was "unbelievable" that these key threads were buried without discussion.

In October 2020, as doubts about the Mojiang mine intensified, a team of journalists from the BBC attempted to gain access to the mine itself. They were followed by plainclothes police and discovered that the road ahead happened to be blocked by a broken truck.

Shi Zhengli is now facing increasing questioning from the international media, she told the BBC. "I just downloaded and read the master's thesis of that student at Kunming Hospital University and read it.... Its conclusion has neither evidence nor logic, but was used by conspiracy theorists to suspect me. If you were me, you What will you do?"

VIII. The Gain-of-Function Controversy

On January 3, 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, received a call from his counterpart, Dr. Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Gao Fu described a mysterious new type of pneumonia that seemed to be infected only by people who had been to a certain market in Wuhan. Redfield immediately suggested to him that a team of experts could be sent to help with the investigation.

But when Redfield saw a breakdown of early cases, some of which were family clusters, the market's explanation didn't make sense. Could multiple family members get sick from exposure to the same animal? Redfield said Gao had assured him that the virus would not spread from person to person, but he urged him to do more widespread testing in the community. That effort brought the next choked call back. Gao admits that many of the cases have nothing to do with the market at all. The virus appears to be spreading directly from person to person, which is an even more dire situation.

Redfield immediately thought of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In just a few weeks, a team can complete an antibody test for researchers at the institute and rule it out as a possible source of the outbreak. Redfield formally reiterated his offer to send experts to investigate, but Chinese officials did not respond to his offer.

Redfield, a virologist, has misgivings about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in part because he has been in the midst of a campaign against gain-of-function research for years. In 2011, Ron Fouchier, a researcher at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, announced that he had genetically modified the H5N1 strain of avian influenza to transmit in ferrets, which are genetically It is closer to humans than mice, and the debate over this research has swept the virology community. Fouchier quietly declared that he had created "one of the most dangerous viruses that can be created."

Scientists have since debated the risks and benefits of such research. Proponents claim that gain-of-function experiments can help prevent pandemics by highlighting potential risks and accelerating vaccine development. Critics argue that if pathogens that do not exist in nature are created, there is bound to be a risk of inadvertently leaking them.

In October 2014, the Obama administration decided to suspend new funding for acquisition-of-function research projects that could make influenza, MERS or SARS viruses more virulent or more transmissible. But in the statement announcing the suspension, a footnote suggested that exceptions could be made when "urgently necessary to protect public health or national security."

In the first year of the Trump administration, the moratorium was lifted and replaced by a review system called the HHS P3CO Framework (Management and Oversight of Potential Pandemic Pathogens). It puts the responsibility for ensuring safety on the federal departments or agencies that fund research. This system shrouds the censorship process in secrecy. "The names of the reviewers were not released, and the details of the experiments to be reviewed are largely confidential," says Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Marc Lipsitch. Lipsitch opposes gain-of-function studies 's claims contributed to the last government moratorium on funding. (A spokesperson for the National Institutes of Health told Vanity Fair: "Information about individual unfunded applications is not made public to maintain confidentiality and protect sensitive information, raw data and intellectual property").

Inside the NIH, which funds gain-of-function research, the P3CO framework has been largely dismissed and ignored, with a longtime agency official saying: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban virology. He went on to add: "Even after the last funding pause, everyone just blinked and tacitly continued with the gain-of-function experiment in hand.

Briton Peter Daszak, 55, is chairman of the EcoHealth Alliance. It's a New York-based nonprofit with a laudable goal: to prevent outbreaks of emerging diseases by protecting ecosystems. In May 2014, five months before the government suspended funding for gain-of-function research, the EcoHealth Alliance received a grant of approximately $3.7 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which it allocated a portion of the money to. Giving a variety of institutions engaged in collecting bat samples, building models and conducting gain-of-function experiments to understand which animal viruses are capable of infecting humans. Neither the moratorium nor the P3CO framework has affected this grant.

Through 2018, the EcoHealth Alliance pulled in up to $15 million a year in grants from a range of federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and USAID. Shi Zhengli herself listed more than $1.2 million in grant support from the U.S. government on her resume: $665,000 from the National Institutes of Health from 2014 to 2019; and $559,500 from the U.S. Agency for International Development during the same period. At least some of these funds are provided through the EcoHealth Alliance.

The EcoHealth Alliance's practice of splitting large government grants into smaller sub-grants to individual laboratories and institutions has given it enormous clout in the field of virology. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University said the funds allow the EcoHealth Alliance to buy off the labs it supports "to keep them in the dark." Vanity Fair asked the EcoHealth Alliance for various specific questions, and a spokesman for the alliance said on behalf of the group and Daszak: "We have no comment").

As the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, the cooperation between the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been targeted by the Trump administration. During a White House COVID-19 news briefing on April 17, 2020, a reporter from conspiracy theorist right-wing outlet Newsmax asked Trump a factually inaccurate question, falsely claiming that the National Institutes of Health sent A tier 4 laboratory in China provided $3.7 million in funding. "Why would the United States give China such funding?" the reporter asked.

"We're going to end this appropriation soon," Trump replied, adding: "I'm curious as to which president passed it."

A week later, an NIH official notified Daszak in writing that his government funding had been terminated. Dr. Anthony Fauci later testified before a congressional committee that the order came from the White House. The decision sparked a storm: 81 Nobel laureates in science condemned the decision in an open letter to Trump health officials, and 60 Minutes reported on the Trump administration's politicization of science short-sighted behavior.

Daszak appears to have fallen victim to a political campaign to blame the Covid-19 pandemic on China, Dr. Fauci and all scientists, while diverting attention from the Trump administration's botched response . "Daszak is a totally fine, decent guy, an 'old-fashioned altruist,'" the NIH official commented. "Seeing this happen to him, it's really makes me sad. "

In July, the NIH tried to backtrack. It resumed funding for the EcoHealth Alliance but suspended its research activities until it met seven conditions, some of which were so far beyond the purview of a nonprofit that they were almost impossible. These conditions include: providing information about a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who "seemed to disappear", rumored to be patient zero on social media, and explaining the reduction in mobile phone traffic and the placement of roads around the Wuhan Institute of Virology in October 2019 roadblock situation.

Click to view full file Laura, Michael (NIH/OD) [E]

But conservatives who believe in conspiracy theories aren't the only ones scoffing at Daszak. Ebright likens Daszak's research model -- bringing samples from remote areas to cities, then sequencing and culturing the virus and trying to genetically modify it to make it more virulent -- to "using a Look for a gas leak with a lighted match". In addition, Ebright believes that Daszak's research falls short of its stated goal of predicting and preventing pandemics through global collaboration.

According to emails obtained by a freedom-of-information group called U.S. Right to Know, it quickly became apparent that not only did Daszak sign the influential Lancet statement, but the entire co-signature was organized by him. He masked his role as organizer and intended to create the illusion that the scientific community had reached a consensus.

Under the subject line "You don't need a 'statement', Ralph!!" he emailed two scientists, one of whom was Dr. Ralph Barrick of the University of North Carolina, who worked with Zhengli Shi Conducted gain-of-function studies and created a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells (reviewed in Section 5 of this article). "You, me and he shouldn't have signed this statement so it would appear to be at a distance from us so as not to backfire." Daszak added, "Afterwards, the channel through which the statement is issued will not make it apparent that we have By working together, we can maximize our independent voice.”

Barrick agreed, writing back: "Otherwise it would look like a selfish defense and we would lose influence."

Barrick did not sign the statement. But in the end, Daszak signed. At least six other signatories have worked for, or been funded by, the EcoHealth Alliance. The statement ends with a statement of objectivity. "We declare that there is no conflict of interest here."

There's a reason Daszak mobilized so quickly, says Jamie Metzl: "If the host animal is the origin, it's a testament to...his life's work....but, If the pandemic started with a lab leak, it would hit virology as hard as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear science." It could put the field in an indefinite suspension of research and Funding restrictions.

IX. Memo Showdown

By the summer of 2020, the State Department's investigation into the origins of COVID-19 had cooled. Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Officers returned to their normal jobs: monitoring biological threats around the world. "We're not looking at Wuhan," Thomas DiNano said. That fall, the State Department team got a tip from a foreign source that key information likely already existed in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files but had not been analyzed. In November, the tip pointed investigators to previously obtained classified information. "It was absolutely shocking," said a former State Department official. Three government officials told Vanity Fair that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 and had been diagnosed with a disease similar to COVID-19. Symptoms went to the hospital for medical treatment. The research direction of all three is related to the gain of function of the coronavirus.

While it's not clear what made them sick, "these guys weren't cleaners or doormen," said the former State Department official, "they were active researchers. And the most striking part is definitely the dates of these things, because If that really was the origin, they got caught." The reaction within the State Department was, "Damn it," recalls a former senior official. "Maybe we should let the top know." The investigation resumed.

An intelligence analyst working with David Ashe went through classified channels and uncovered a report outlining the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis. The report was written in May by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which conducts national security research for the Department of Energy. But the report appears to be buried in a system of classified documents.

Now, officials are beginning to wonder if someone is deliberately hiding material that supports the lab leak theory. "Why do my employees need to find a needle in a haystack of documents?" Dinanno was full of questions. Later, DOE officials overseeing the Lawrence Livermore lab also tried unsuccessfully to prevent State Department investigators from speaking to the report's authors. This made their suspicions stronger.

Their frustration peaked in December, when they finally briefed Chris Ford, the acting undersecretary for arms control and international security. His hostility toward their investigation was so severe that the investigation team was on the verge of thinking he was a narrow-minded official bent on clearing up the malfeasance of Chinese institutions. But Ford has years of experience in nuclear nonproliferation and has long been a China hawk. Ford told Vanity Fair that he sees his role as ensuring the reliability of any investigation into the origin of COVID-19 that is under his control. He believes that "accepting things that make us look like charlatans" will only backfire.

There is another reason for Ford's hostility. He had heard about the investigative team from colleagues at other agencies before hearing their reports, and the secrecy of the investigation gave him a "sixth sense*" that the process was being "cobbled together by eccentric temps" up. He wondered if someone had launched an unaccountable investigation with the expectation of reaching some specific goal?

He's not the only one with concerns. As one senior administration official with knowledge of the State Department's investigation put it, "Their investigation was written for some of the Trump administration's intelligence clients. We asked them for source reports that would support those conclusions. It's going to take a hundred Years. And then you finally read a report and it mentions a tweet and a date. Neither is anything you can go back and find.”

Ford recalled that after hearing the investigators' findings, a technologist with the State Department's Office of Biological Weapons "thought they were all mentally ill."

The State Department's investigation team believes that it is Ford who is pushing a pre-determined conclusion that COVID-19 originated in nature. A week later, one of the investigative team members attended a meeting where Christopher Parker, who worked under Ford, advised those present not to draw attention to U.S.-funded gain-of-function research.

As deep mistrust continued to simmer, the State Department's investigative team convened a panel of experts to secretly "Red Teaming" the lab leaks. This approach would attack the theory from every angle to see if it still holds up. The expert meeting took place on the evening of January 7, the day after the rebellion in the Capitol. At the time, Ford had already announced his plans to resign.

According to minutes of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair, 29 people logged into the State Department's secure video call, which lasted three hours. Experts in attendance included Ralph Barrick, Elena Chen and Stanford University microbiologist David Relman.

Ash invited Dr. Steven Quay, a breast cancer expert who founded a biopharmaceutical company, to present a statistical analysis comparing the likelihood of laboratory versus natural sources. Barrick didn't think Quay's analysis was credible enough, noting that the calculations didn't take into account the millions of unknown bat virus sequences in nature. When a State Department adviser asked Quay if he had done a similar analysis, he replied, "There's a first time for everything," according to the minutes.

While they questioned Quay's findings, scientists believe there are other reasons to suspect the virus came from a lab. Part of the mission of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is to sample from nature and provide early warning of "viruses that can infect humans," Rehman said. The 2012 infection of six miners "deserves mass coverage at the time." However, those cases were never reported to WHO.

Barrick added that if SARS-CoV-2 came from a "robust host animal population", one might see "multiple introduction events" rather than a single outbreak, although he also cautioned that this would not be the case Prove that "[the virus] escaped from a laboratory". This statement prompted Ash to ask further: "So is it possible that this virus has not been gene-edited?" (Original: "Could this not have been partially bioengineered?")

Ford is very disturbed by the (what he believes) weak evidence provided by the investigative team and their secret discussions this time around. He stayed up all night, writing his concerns into a four-page memo. After saving the memo in PDF format so that it could not be edited, he emailed the document to various State Department officials early the next morning.

In the memo, Ford criticized the group's "lack of data support," adding: "I would also remind you not to believe that there is anything inherently suspicious about the involvement of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the classified Wuhan Institute of Virology program, or the ability to Allusions to activities related to biological warfare. It’s hard to argue that the military’s involvement in classified virus research is inherently problematic because the U.S. military has also been deeply involved in U.S. virus research for many years.”

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The next day, Jan. 9, Thomas DiNano sent out a five-page document rebutting Ford's previous memo (though it was mis-dated "December 9"). He accused Ford of misrepresenting the panel's efforts and cited obstacles his investigative team faced: "fear and contempt" from technicians; warnings that they should not investigate the origins of COVID-19 for fear it would "It got out of hand"; and "the (leadership) was totally unresponsive to briefings and detailed reports." He added that Quay was invited because the National Intelligence Council failed to provide statistical help.

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A year of mutual suspicion finally turned into a memo showdown.

State Department investigators have moved forward, determined to make their concerns public. They continued a weeks-long effort to declassify information sifted by the intelligence community. On January 15, five days before President Joe Biden was sworn in, the State Department released a factual fact sheet on the activities of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, revealing key information: In the fall of 2019, the Prior to the case, several researchers at the Institute of Virology had developed COVID-19-like symptoms; and researchers there had collaborated with the Chinese military on covert projects, "representing the Chinese military in classified research since at least 2017, in which Including animal experiments."

The statement has withstood "radical questioning," as a former State Department official put it, and the Biden administration has not denied its content. "I'm pleased to see Pompeo's statement passed," said Chris Ford, who personally signed the fact sheet before leaving the State Department. It gave me a sigh of relief."

X. Investigation team to Wuhan

In early July, the World Health Organization invited the U.S. government to refer experts to Wuhan to investigate, a sign of progress in the long-delayed investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Questions about whether the WHO is influenced by China, its secrecy and the raging pandemic have all turned the scheduled investigation into a minefield of resentment and suspicion in international relations.

Within weeks, the U.S. government submitted three candidates to the WHO: an FDA veterinarian, a CDC epidemiologist, and an NIA virologist . No one was selected. Instead, only one representative from the United States was approved. He is Peter Daszak.

It was clear from the start that China would control who came and what they could see. In July, when WHO sent member states a draft survey clause on the mission, the PDF was titled "Final version agreed between China and WHO," suggesting that China had pre-approved its content.

Part of the blame for this situation lies with the Trump administration, which failed to prevent China from gaining control of the scope of the investigation when it delineated the scope of the mission two months ago. Instead of calling for a full-scale investigation into the origins of the pandemic, the resolution passed at the World Health Assembly called for a mission "to identify the virus' animal reservoir." The hypothesis of natural origin became the factual basis for this task. "It's a huge difference that only China understands," said Jamie Metzl. "When the [Trump] administration was sleeping, something really important was happening around the WHO, and The U.S. has no say."

On January 14, 2021, Daszak and 12 other international experts arrived in Wuhan, joining 17 Chinese experts and government entourage. During the month-long mission, they were quarantined in hotel rooms for two weeks. The remaining two weeks of the survey were less about investigation and more about receiving propaganda, with a visit to an exhibition celebrating President Xi’s leadership. The investigation team saw little of the raw data, only the Chinese government's analysis of the data.

They made a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they met with Shi Zhengli, which is described in an annex to the visit report. It stands to reason that the investigation team will definitely request access to the database of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The library contained about 22,000 virus samples and sequences, but it has been taken offline. At an event convened by a London-based group on March 10, Daszak was asked whether the mission had made such a request. He said it wasn't necessary. Shi Zhengli has said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology shut down its database due to hacker attempts during the pandemic. "It's absolutely reasonable," Daszak said, "and we're not asking to look at the data.... As you know, a lot of this work is working with the EcoHealth Alliance.... We do basically know what's in those databases. There's no evidence in those databases that there is anything closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13, it's that simple."

In fact, the database went offline on September 12, 2019, three months before the official start of the pandemic, a detail discovered by Gilles Demaneff and two of his DRASTIC colleagues.

After a two-week investigation, Chinese and international experts ended the mission by a show of hands to decide which origin scenario was more likely. Direct transmission from bats to humans: generally possible to more likely. Transmission by intermediate animals: more likely to very likely. Transmission via frozen food: generally possible. Transmission via laboratory accident: extremely unlikely.

On March 30, 2021, media around the world reported on the 120-page report released by the mission. The discussion of the lab leak takes up less than two pages. Jamie Metzel called the report "fatally flawed" on Twitter, saying: "They were sent to prove one hypothesis instead of looking at all of them fairly."

The report also recounted how Shi Zhengli refuted the conspiracy theory, telling the interviewed panel: "There are no reports of unusual illnesses, no such diagnoses, and all staff tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies." She The claims directly conflict with an investigation summary released by the State Department on January 15. "It was a deliberate lie by someone who knew the truth," said a former national security official.

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In an internal U.S. government analysis obtained by Vanity Fair, the WHO report was found to be inaccurate and even contradictory, with some undercutting conclusions drawn elsewhere and others relying on retracted papers. Regarding the four possible origin hypotheses, the internal analysis noted that the report "does not describe how these hypotheses arose, how they were tested, or how trade-offs were made between them to decide that one was more likely than the other to be Facts." The report added that the possibility of a laboratory accident had only been reviewed "coarsely" and that "the evidence presented in the paper does not appear to be sufficient to conclude that the hypothesis is 'highly unlikely'."

The report's most surprising critic is the WHO director himself, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia. With the World Health Organization's credibility increasingly at stake, he appeared to admit that the report was flawed at a news conference the day it was released. "As far as WHO is concerned, all the hypotheses are still being discussed," he said. "We haven't found the source of the virus, and we have to continue to follow the science and work without leaving out any details."

His remarks reflected "landmark courage", Metzl said, "at the risk of sacrificing his entire career to defend WHO's integrity". (WHO declined to make Tedros available for an interview).

At that time, an international consortium of about two dozen scientists, including DRASTIC researcher Gilles Demaneff and Rutgers University's EcoHealth Alliance critic Richard Ebright, had found A way to bypass what Metzl described as the "rejection wall" erected by major journals. Under Metzl's direction, the scientists began publishing the open letter in early March. And published a second letter on April 7, condemning the unreliability of the WHO investigation report and calling for a full investigation into the origins of COVID-19. The open letter received extensive coverage in major newspapers across the country.

More and more people are insisting to know what really happened inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Is the statement about the sick researcher and secret military research accurate in the fact sheet released by the U.S. State Department?

A week before the mission report was released, Metzl managed to speak directly to Shi Zhengli. In a March 23 webinar hosted by Rutgers Medical School, Metzl asked if she knew about all the research being done on the virus in Wuhan and all the viruses kept there, as well as what the U.S. government said about classified military research is it right or not. This is how she replied:

"Our work, our research is open, we have a lot of international collaborations. And as far as I know, all of our research work is open and transparent. So when COVID-19 started, we listened to There are rumors that there are some projects in our lab, etc., cooperation with the military, etc., these rumors. But this is not true, because I am the director of the laboratory and in charge of research activities. I don't know Any kind of [military] research work in this lab. This is misinformation."

One of the main arguments against the laboratory leak theory is actually based on Shi Zhengli's truth when he claimed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology did not hide any virus samples more similar to SARS-CoV-2. In Metzl's view, if she lied about the military's involvement in research, or about anything else, her other statements would be completely unreliable.

XI. Inside the Virology Institute

In January 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology issued a press release praising Shi Zhengli for "outstanding and pioneering achievements in the discovery and characterization of important bat-borne viruses." This news comes against the backdrop of her being elected as a fellow of the prestigious American Society for Microbiology, just one of the latest milestones in her glittering scientific career. In China, the famous "Batgirl" is easily recognizable in photos. In the photo, she usually wears a full-body positive pressure suit and is in the BSL-4 laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Because of her "cutting-edge" work, Zhengli Shi is a resident authority figure at international virology conferences, said James LeDuc, longtime director of BSL-4 Galveston National Laboratory in Texas. . At the international conferences he organizes, Shi Zhengli and Ralph Barrick from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are regulars. "She's a charming person, very fluent in English and French," LeDuc said, sounding almost wistful. He added: "That's how the scientific community works. You bring people together, people share their data, and you go out for a beer."

Shi Zhengli's journey to the pinnacle of the field of virology began with an expedition to a remote bat cave in the southernmost part of China. In 2006, she was trained at the BSL-4 Jean Merieux-Inserm laboratory in Lyon, France. In 2011, she was appointed director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases under the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and in 2013 she was appointed director of the BSL-3 laboratory.

It's hard to imagine anyone, anywhere, being better prepared to deal with COVID-19. On December 30, 2019, around 7 p.m., according to her description to Scientific American, Shi Zhengli received a call from her supervisor, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He wants her to investigate a few patients hospitalized with a mysterious pneumonia: "Drop everything you've got and deal with it now."

The next day, by analyzing samples from seven patients, her team became one of the first to sequence the disease and identify it as a novel coronavirus related to SARS. By January 21, she had been appointed as the leader of the Hubei Province COVID-19 emergency scientific research team. In a terrifying moment, in a country that reveres scientists, she is at the pinnacle of her career.

But her ascent did not come without a price. There is reason to believe that it will be difficult for her to speak her mind freely, or to take a path that is in line with science but not the line of the Chinese Communist Party. Although Shi Zhengli had planned to share the isolated virus sample with her friend in Texas, James Leduc, Beijing officials stopped her. By mid-January, a team of military scientists led by China's top virologist and biochemical expert, Major General Chen Wei, had begun work inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Under the scrutiny of many governments, including China, and surrounded by bizarre conspiracy theories and well-founded suspicions, Shi Zhengli began to attack critics. "The 2019 novel coronavirus is nature's punishment for human uncivilized habits," she wrote in a WeChat Moments on February 2. "I, Shi Zhengli, vouch for my life and have nothing to do with the laboratory. Advice Those who believe and spread rumors of bad media, shut up your stinky mouths."

While Shi Zhengli describes the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a de facto transparent international research center plagued by false accusations, the State Department's January fact sheet offers an entirely different picture: one that conducts classified military research and An institution that hides its existence. Shi Zhengli vehemently denies this, but a former national security official who has read classified U.S. material told Vanity Fair that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, military and civilian researchers “are conducting animal research in the same space.”

"Although this in itself does not prove that the laboratory has leaked, Shi Zhengli's lying about the situation is absolutely 'surely'," said a former State Department official. "This secretive approach reflects the honesty and credibility of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Here There is a huge web of lies, coercion and disinformation that is killing people."

Vanity Fair asked Shi Zhengli and the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology detailed questions. Neither responded to multiple requests for comment sent by email and by phone.

When officials at the National Security Council tracked the collaboration between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and military scientists — which dates back 20 years and resulted in a total of 51 co-authored papers — they also noticed a case in Hong Kong. A book marked by college students. In the book, "The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons," a team of 18 authors and editors, 11 of whom work at the Chinese Air Force Medical University, explores the issues surrounding biological weapons. Various problems arising from the development.

The book not only claims that SARS-CoV-1 is a biological weapon created by terrorists using gene editing, but also contains some alarming practical tips: "Aerosol attacks of biological weapons are best carried out at dawn, dusk, night or cloudy weather. , because UV light destroys pathogens.” It also cites the added benefits of such an attack, such as a sudden surge in hospitalizations that could lead to a collapse in the health care system. One of the book's editors has collaborated with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to publish 12 scientific papers.

The book's dramatic rhetoric could be a hype by Chinese military researchers to sell the book, or an attempt to persuade the PLA to fund the launch of a biological warfare program. When a reporter from The Australian, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, reported details of the book under the headline "China discusses the benefits of biological weapons," the Chinese state-owned Global Times scoffed at the report, And pointed out that the book is available from Amazon.

Incendiary ideas about SARS-CoV-2 as a biological weapon have become an attractive alt-right conspiracy theory, but the circumstances of yet-to-be-published civilian research directed by Shi Zhengli raises more real concerns. Shi Zhengli's own comments in a scientific journal, as well as funding information in a Chinese government database, show that over the past three years, her team has tested two novel but undisclosed bat coronaviruses in humanized mice to Observe its infectivity.

In an editorial in the journal Infectious Diseases and Immunity in April 2021, Shi Zhengli employed a familiar tactic to try to dispel the cloud of doubt that hung over her. She cites scientific consensus, like the Lancet statement. She wrote: "The scientific community strongly rejects these unsubstantiated and misleading speculations and generally accepts that SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin, either produced in an animal host and transmitted to humans, or initially transmitted by a similar virus. After being given to humans, it is formed by mutation.

However, Shi Zhengli's editorial did not play a role in curbing doubts. In a statement published in the journal Science on May 14, 18 prominent scientists called for a "transparent and objective" investigation into the origins of COVID-19, noting: "We must take seriously what we know about nature and experimentation. room escape hypothesis until we have enough data."

Among the signers was Ralph Barrick. He was behind the scenes helping Peter Daszak organize the Lancet autograph 15 months ago. The scientific consensus has been smashed to smithereens.

XII. Out of the Shadows

By the spring of 2021, the debate over the origins of COVID-19 had grown so vicious that both sides began exchanging death threats.

In a March 26 interview with CNN, Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director under Trump, admitted frankly: "I still think this pathogen in Wuhan most likely came from a lab, you know, escaped from there." Redfield added that he believed the release was an accident and not a deliberate act. In his view, nothing that has happened since his first call with Dr. Gao Fu can change a simple fact: the possibility that the Wuhan virus was the source needed to be ruled out, but it could not be ruled out.

After the interview aired, death threats poured into his mailbox. The abuse came not only from strangers who thought he was insensitive to racial issues, but also from well-known scientists, some of whom were once friends. Some people say that he should "run out of fuel and die quickly".

Peter Daszak has also received death threats, some from QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Meanwhile, within the U.S. government, the lab leak hypothesis survived the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. On April 15, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the House Intelligence Committee that two "credible theories" were being weighed: a laboratory accident or a natural occurrence.

Even so, throughout April, discussion of the lab leak was mostly confined to the right-wing media, with Tucker Carlson relishing it and most mainstream media deliberately avoiding it. In Congress, the Republican minority on the energy and commerce committees launched their own investigations, but Democrats had little buy-in, and the National Institutes of Health did not respond to a lengthy list of requests for information.

On May 2, things began to change. The New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade published a long piece on Medium that day. (He has previously written a controversial book discussing the role of genes in shaping social behavior across races.) In the article, he analyzes the scientific threads for and against lab leaks and blames the media for not reporting on both competing hypotheses. Wade devoted an entire chapter to the "furin protease cleavage site," a unique portion of the SARS-CoV-2 gene sequence that allows it to enter human cells efficiently, making the virus more infectious.

In the scientific community, this matter is brought to the table. Wade quotes one of the world's most prominent microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, who believes that the furin protease cleavage site "is central to the search for the origin of the virus." Baltimore, a molecular biology pioneer who won a Nobel Prize, is as far away from Steve Bannon and conspiracy theorists as he is. His judgment that furin protease cleavage sites point to possible gene editing needs to be taken seriously.

As doubts grew, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins issued a May 19 statement claiming that "neither the NIH nor the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has Approved grants to 'function' the coronavirus, to enhance research on the virus' transmissibility and lethality to humans,"

On May 24, the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of WHO, held its annual meeting online. In the weeks leading up to the conference, a series of high-profile news stories came out, including two front-page stories in the Wall Street Journal and a long Medium article by another science reporter from The New York Times. Not surprisingly, the Chinese government hit back during the meeting, saying it would not respond to further questions about its investigation within its borders.

On May 28, two days after President Biden released his 90-day intelligence roundup, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution, helped by Jamie Metzl, calling on the World Health Organization to conduct a full investigation into the origins of the virus. .

Will we finally know the truth? Dr. David Relman of Stanford University School of Medicine has long advocated for a 9/11-like organization to investigate the origins of COVID-19. But he said 9/11 happened in a single day, and "the coronavirus has so many different manifestations, consequences, and different responses from countries. All of this makes it a need to look at hundreds of dimensions. issues to consider".

The bigger problem is that so much time has passed. "Every day, every week, all kinds of information that can help solve the mystery will further dissipate," he said. "The world is changing, physical evidence can be moved, and biological signals are fading."

China is clearly responsible for obstructing investigators. Whether it did so out of pure authoritarian habit, or because it needed to hide a lab leak, we don't know right now. May never know.

The United States should also take some responsibility. Their credibility is minus zero due to Trump and his allies' unprecedented deception and racial strife. And the practice of funding risk research through intermediaries like the EcoHealth Alliance puts leading virologists in a conflict of interest at a time when the world needs their expertise most.

At least for now, it looks like there's hope for a fair investigation -- the kind that Gilles Demaneff and Jamie Metzl wanted from the very beginning. "We need to create a space where all the hypotheses can be considered," Metzl said.

If the lab-leak hypothesis proves to be true, history may credit Demanev and his colleagues for removing a formidable obstacle to later investigations—and they don't intend to stop there. They are now digging into construction orders, sewage output and cell phone data traffic at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The reason that inspired Virginie Courtier, co-founder of the Paris investigation team, to continue the investigation is simple.

"There are some unanswered questions," she said, "and a few people know the answers."

Lili Pike contributed additional reporting for this article, and Stan Friedman provided investigative assistance.

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Annotation: I translated it in a hurry after personal work, trying my best to restore the original expression. If there are any omissions, readers are welcome to correct me. All rights belong to the original work.

In addition, the DRASTIC team has a certain weakening in this article. Newsweek's report on the method and discovery of the team's open source investigation (the Wuhan Institute of Virology's investigation of the coronavirus strain discovered in Yunnan in 2013 - the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 - Actively conducting research) is described in more detail.