Have We Learned Anything?

At least in the case of Covid, probably not.

In October 2021, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (1) announced a $125 million, 5 year grant, to Washington State University and partners to find and collect an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 novel viruses existing in the wild, including coronaviruses, "which researchers will then screen and sequence the genomes of the ones that pose the most risk to animal and human health".

I was alerted to this by a recent post from Richard H Ebright, Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers, a long time opponent of virus hunting, who only became aware of the grant via a July 5 article in Forbes by Steven Salzberg, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins, who also opposes such research. 

UPDATE: August 5, 2022  This link takes you to Prof Ebright's Senate testimony on August 3, 2022 in which he explains what gain of function research is, why he opposes it, the failure of NIH to enforce its own guidelines, and how it may be linked to a potential lab leak from the Wuhan lab, the possible origin point for Covid 19.  You can watch the entire hearing with Ebright and two other scientists at this C-Span link.  It is long (1:45) but a very clear and educational discussion by the panelists, making it essential viewing for anyone trying to understand the issue.  It is also very sobering, not just about the potential source of covid-19, but about the larger implications of continued American funding of such research, of which we are the world's leader, and its potential for unleashing an even more deadly pandemic.(2)

Why is this significant?  Because we are still in the midst of a novel-Covid virus pandemic that started in the city which houses the world's largest virology laboratory specializing in finding novel coronaviruses existing in the wild, bringing them back to its lab where it screens and sequences the genomes of the ones that pose the most risk to animal and human health, which it does by, among other things, running them through humanized mice, and where the lab may also have been altering the genomes in unique ways to test their potential human impact.

Two and a half years after the pandemic began there has not been conducted, by China, the U.S., WHO, or by anyone else, a full and transparent investigation into the origins of the pandemic, and key information remains withheld (and possibly destroyed) by China and the United States.

Ebright, Salzberg and others opposed to virus hunting in the wild and gain of function research, believe it highly unlikely that it will provide the benefits its proponents promote, identification, prevention, and development of vaccines in advance; rather that it risks creating the very pandemic it seeks to prevent.  They believe Exhibit 1 is the Covid-19 pandemic, which broke out in the very city where the world's leading research lab on bat viruses is located, yet it was unable to do anything to predict or prevent this very outbreak and, may indeed, have been its very origin.

At a minimum, the U.S. should not be funding any further research of this type until it determines whether the Covid outbreak was of zoonotic origin or via a laboratory leak, and until we have full confidence that such research can be done safely in non-urban locations.  Even with that, I am unpersuaded at this point of the value of such research.

While we desperately need an open investigation into all possibilities, my own views on the origins have changed since early 2020.  At that time, I felt a lab leak was a possible source, but also believed the predominant theory that it was the wet market in Wuhan that was the likely source (including the possibility that a lab tech might have sold an infected animal to someone in the market, which has happened before in China).  Today, my default assumption is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was the source via an accidental release.

Back in March 2020, I misunderstood some factual aspects, having heard the WIV was located in Wuhan after the SARS epidemic because it was near the area where infected bats were found, thus facilitating study.  This was incorrect.  The WIV was opened before SARS and the bats it was studying were imported from hundreds of miles away in South China and Southeast Asia.

We also now know that 2 1/2 years after the pandemic began no intermediate host animals, the direct transmittal route to humans, have been identified for the Covid-19 virus.  I was in China just before and just after the SARS outbreak and am well aware that the intermediate host (civets) were identified within two months.(3)

It's also been revealed that U.S. Embassy officials in Beijing who visited the WIV prior to the pandemic were concerned enough about safety issues to prominently raise this in communications.

But there's more, and it goes to the reaction to the outbreak in China and, sadly, in the United States.

In September 2019, the WIV online database went offline.  This database, the largest in the world of coronavirus genomes, had been available to researchers from other countries, including the U.S., which also provided some of WIV's funding.(4)  It has never been restored.  The China government refused to fully cooperate and give open access to the WIV during the WHO investigation in early 2020, and has refused repeated calls to cooperate with any further investigation.  More recently, we've learned that samples taken from early Covid patients in Wuhan, which might shed some light on origins and timing of the outbreak, have been destroyed.  The behavior of the government and associated entities is in marked contrast to what happened with SARS in the early 2000s, and we can make reasonable inferences from this behavior. 

And then there is the role of the United States.

Since 2009, USAID has run an international program called PREDICT, funding projects to identify and analyze wildlife viruses with the potential to cause pandemics, and one of its long-time partners is the EcoHealth Alliance.  Over the years, as virus-hunting has increased under PREDICT,  EcoHealth Alliance has been generously funded to coordinate these efforts internationally.  For the five years prior to the recent announcement of the Washington State grant, EcoHealth had a $62 million contract to undertake similar activities, meaning that the recent grant is not just a continuation but an acceleration of virus-hunting efforts.  EcoHealth Alliance has played a key role because of its advocacy, project leadership and serving as a link between various international organizations, including in the U.S., and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  In 2016, a parallel international effort, the Global Virome Project (GVP), spearheaded by EcoHealth, was launched to identify all zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential.

In response to FOIA requests since the outbreak of the pandemic, we now have documents showing that the GVP was proceeding quickly and along with funding from NIAID and other sources was also being funded by the Chinese government.  China was also independently funding this research; according to a State Department cable in April 2018:

"Chinese govt funds projects similar to GVP to investigate the background of viruses and bacteria.  This essentially constituted China's own Virome Project . . . The Wuhan Institute of Virology . . . is the forerunner to the Global Virome Project . . . China has expressed interest in building the GVP database.  Other countries . . . are skeptical on whether China could remain transparent as a gatekeeper for this information."

According to the annual PREDICT report in December 2018, the China Virome Project would rollout in 2019-20.

For technical expertise in evaluating projects and contractors, USAID relies on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is housed within NIH and headed since 1984 by Dr Anthony Fauci, who has been a prominent advocate for virus-hunting and gain of function research.  NIH and NIAID also directly fund research regarding bats and coronaviruses, including grants to WIV.  In addition, DoD is also funding research in this area through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  EcoHealth Alliance has received funding from all of these sources.

Further, in early 2018, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a proposal to DARPA for Project DEFUSE, a name taken from the goal of the project to "defuse the potential for spillover of novel bat-origin high zoonotic-risk SARS-related coronaviruses in Asia".  To do this, field teams would identify and sample bats with potential high risk spillover SARSr-CoVs.  The teams would then "sequence their spike proteins, reverse engineer them to conduct binding assays and insert them into SARSr-CoV backbones (. . . exempt from dual use and gain of function concerns) to infect humanized mice and assess capacity to cause SARS-like disease".

 

Included in the proposal was a plan to insert a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus.  In early 2020, when the COVID-19 genome was analyzed a key and distinctive feature was it had a furin cleavage site which enabled the virus to more efficiently bind to and release its genetic material into a human cell, triggering a dispute among virologists as to its origin.

In addition to EcoHealth Alliance as the lead organization (with Dr Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth as the Principal Investigator for the project), the proposal identifies five other "team members", four of which are located in the United States, the fifth being the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The proposal was rejected by DARPA.  Among the reasons for rejection were:

 

1.  The proposal is considered to potentially involve GoF/DURC research . . . 

2.  . . . the proposal does not mention of assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research 

3.  Nor does the proposal mention of assess Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) issues . . . 

4. The proposal hardly addresses or discusses ethical, legal, and social issues.

Meanwhile, during 2018, the Chinese Academy of Sciences was funding projects at WIV, along the same lines as those proposed in project DEFUSE, and Peter Daszak made continued visits and was in frequent communication with WIV.

What we have in the two years leading to the pandemic is an accelerating effort to identify and manipulate potentially threatening bat viruses at a laboratory in the very city where the outbreak started.

[UPDATE 8/3/22: In a recent article, Alina Chan put it this way:

Disturbingly, documents leaked in September 2021 revealed that Wuhan scientists were part of an international research proposal (from early 2018) that described exactly the type of research that could have created the pandemic virus. Put it this way, it is as if these scientists proposed to put horns on horses and 2 years later a unicorn shows up in their town. When they discover this unicorn and describe it to the public, they talk about every other feature on the creature except for the horn.

Her article, The Evidence For A Natural vs Lab Origin of Covid-19, provides a succinct summary of the argument for both, and why further investigation is necessary.]

Even without China cooperation, there should be a lot of additional data in the hands of the U.S. and EcoHealth Alliance which might shed more insight on origins, but EcoHealth and Peter Daszak have refused to release data in its possession or discuss the matter in public and the U.S. has actively obstructed efforts to use FOIA to get relevant documents released.  What little I have related above, is only known because some information has been pried loose and other have come from leaks inside the agency, but what material has been released under FOIA has been heavily redacted.  This September 2021 article from The Atlantic, discusses some of the government obstruction, and its significance, particularly in regard to the furin cleavage site proposal made in 2018 to DARPA.

And that's even before we get to the events of early 2020.  On January 31, 2020 Dr Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute (a NIH and NIAID funding recipient) sent an email to Dr Fauci and others in which he wrote:

Some of the features (potentially) look engineered . . . all [referring to Andersen and other scientists] find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory . . . we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change. 

Over the next four days there was an extensive exchange of emails and a multiparty conference call in which Dr Fauci and Francis Collins (head of NIH) participated.  While we know this occurred, NIH and NIAID have refused to release all but a tiny portion of these conversations.  Then, on February 4 there was a new consensus with Dr Andersen writing an email calling lab origin hypotheses “crackpot theories,” writing, “engineering can mean many things and could be done for basic research or nefarious reasons, but the data conclusively show that neither was done”, followed by a coordinated publicity effort to denounce any proponents of a lab leak as a racist conspiracy theorists, and then a series of articles in prestigious publications like The Lancet proclaiming the virus to clearly be of natural origins.(5)  Many of the virologists signing on to these articles were NIH and/or NIAID grant recipients or had financial ties to EcoHealth Alliance, and it was later revealed Peter Daszak played a key role in coordinating these efforts, though he cleverly avoided having his name attached to them.  For a more detailed explanation of the role of EcoHealth read this Vanity Fair article from March 2022, while this 2021 article in the MIT Technology Review discusses what the WIV may have been up to and the efforts of Dr Fauci to cover any tracks linking his work to the WIV.  For a detailed discussion of the late January/early February 2020 emails see this article in City Journal, by Nicholas Wade.

Peter Daszak has refused all requests to cooperate with congressional inquiries (helped by the fact that the majority party as no interest in such inquiries; for a summary of issues read this letter from House Republican committee members). 

Daszak's evasiveness has been so flagrant that it caused Prof Jeffrey Sachs, the politically progressive scientist from Columbia University, to dissolve the Covid origins panel he was asked to lead by The Lancet. According to Sachs, Daszak, the only American allowed by the China government to participate in the very limited WHO investigation in early 2020, and who was a member of The Lancet panel, refused to cooperate and provide EcoHealth grant documents.  At that point, Sachs recused Daszak from the panel and then, when the EcoHealth documents were leaked and the full extent of Daszak's conflict of interest became apparent, Sachs dissolved the entire panel because he felt its efforts were completely compromised.

These efforts have continued.  In February 2022, the New York Times ran a story on two preprints (non-peer reviewed and yet to be published) articles, one by Dr Andersen, purporting to prove the pandemic started in the Wuhan wet market.  This was part of a media blitz in which, once published by the Times, a paper which combines its own agenda on this with the stunning scientific ignorance of its reporters, it was picked up by many other publications, who went to other virologists primed to give quotes like the preprints had "cracked the case" and "settled" the controversy.  Naturally, the Times article presented no critiques of the preprint, although many soon became available, pointing out the obvious weaknesses in the papers.  I believe the preprints have still never been published in a journal.

 

[UPDATE 8/4/22: The preprints have now passed peer review and been published with much misleading coverage, despite the fact that peer review resulted in the most extreme claims and language in the preprints being modified.  Alina Chan provides a detailed critique in Evidence For A Natural Origin of Covid-19 No Longer Dispositive after Scientific Peer Review, in which she notes:

"After peer review, unscientific language was removed from the Worobey et al. manuscript. However, these strong claims in the preprint had already been widely reported in the media back in February 2022. Needless to say, those journalists likely will not be making corrections or publishing new stories to clarify that these excessive claims have now been eliminated by scientific peer review . . . there are no longer claims of dispositive or incontrovertible evidence in the peer-reviewed paper"

 

"The peer-reviewed paper has an entirely new section on “Study Limitations” which acknowledges that the scientists do not have access to the early Covid-19 case data or locations, lack direct evidence of a market animal infected with the pandemic virus, and lack complete details of how the market had been sampled for the virus."]

In May 2022, Prof Sachs and Prof Neil Harrison (also of Columbia) wrote an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling on:

. . . US government scientific agencies, most notably the NIH, to support a full, independent, and transparent investigation of the origins of SARS-CoV-2. This should take place, for example, within a tightly focused science-based bipartisan Congressional inquiry with full investigative powers, which would be able to ask important questions—but avoid misguided witch-hunts governed more by politics than by science.

They go on to write:

The investigation into the origin of the virus has been made difficult by the lack of key evidence from the earliest days of the outbreak—there’s no doubt that greater transparency on the part of Chinese authorities would be enormously helpful. Nevertheless, we argue here that there is much important information that can be gleaned from US-based research institutions, information not yet made available for independent, transparent, and scientific scrutiny.

 

Blanket denials from the NIH are no longer good enough. Although the NIH and USAID have strenuously resisted full disclosure of the details of the EHA-WIV-UNC work program, several documents leaked to the public or released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have raised concerns. These research proposals make clear that the EHA-WIV-UNC collaboration was involved in the collection of a large number of so-far undocumented SARS-like viruses and was engaged in their manipulation within biological safety level (BSL)-2 and BSL-3 laboratory facilities, raising concerns that an airborne virus might have infected a laboratory worker. A variety of scenarios have been discussed by others, including an infection that involved a natural virus collected from the field or perhaps an engineered virus manipulated in one of the laboratories.

The article, which can be found here, goes into great detail on the specific aspects of the Covid-19 genome that raise concerns, and is worth reading in full. 

In an op-ed published a few days later in the Boston Globe, Sachs and Harrison were even more blunt:

The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic remain unknown, but may have had an assist from advanced US biotechnology. We do know this: The National Institutes of Health, which funded a lot of potentially hazardous and under-regulated laboratory manipulation of SARS-like viruses, has been less than transparent. And that’s stating matters politely. The NIH has done its part to throw scientists and the public off track regarding the US-based and funded research.

The fact is that NIH has not told the American people, or the scientific community, what it knows about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. In a conference call call on Feb. 1, 2020, NIH leaders heard top virologists explain why the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 indicated the possibility of laboratory manipulation of the virus. Yet just a few days later, NIH encouraged a team of scientists to prepare a paper declaring a natural origin of the virus. Subsequently, NIH has resisted the release of critical documentation and dragged its feet until forced to make disclosures under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, often providing only highly redacted materials.

The Biden administration and the scientific community need to do better. What work did NIH, DOD, and other US agencies fund that might have contributed to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2? When did agencies of the USG first learn of the virus? What evidence might there be in the United States in the form of laboratory notes, electronic communications, virus databases, and other troves of information, that can shed light on this matter? Why did some components of the Intelligence Community lean toward a laboratory release as the source of the pandemic?

[UPDATE 8/4/22:  In an interview with Current Affairs (which you should read in its entirety), Professor Sachs elaborates on why an investigation is so needed and his theory as to why it has not yet happened in the United States.  Sachs goes into the details about the controversy over gain of function research and the extensive efforts of American agencies and scientists to block the release of relevant documents and stifle discussion.  

Regarding that research effort:

"The alternative that is the right one to look at is part of a very extensive research program that was underway from 2015 onward, funded by the NIH, by Tony Fauci, in particular NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], and it was to examine the spillover potential of SARS-like viruses. The champions of this research explained in detail their proposals. But after the event, we’d never asked them, “So what were you actually doing? What experiments did you do? What do you know?” We somehow never asked. It was better just to sweep it under the rug, which is what Fauci and the NIH have done up until this point. Maybe they could tell us, “Oh, full exoneration,” but they haven’t told us that at all. They haven’t shown us anything."

"Now, again, let me emphasize, we don’t have definitive evidence of either hypothesis. But what we do have is definitive evidence that officialdom has tried to keep our eyes away from the lab creation hypothesis."

The most interesting things that I got as chair of the Lancet commission came from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits and whistleblower leaks from inside the U.S. government. Isn’t that terrible? NIH was actually asked at one point: give us your research program on SARS-like viruses. And you know what they did? They released the cover page and redacted 290 pages. They gave us a cover page and 290 blank pages! [emphasis added] That’s NIH, for heaven’s sake. That’s not some corporation.

He also goes into more detail as to why he disbanded the task force on Covid origins, which he'd put together in his role running The Lancet's pandemic commission:

I appointed him—this was Peter Daszak—I appointed him to chair the task force of the pandemic commission that I was running for the Lancet. And he headed a task force on the origins. I thought, naively at the beginning, “Well, here’s a guy who is so connected, he would know.” And then I realized he was not telling me the truth. And it took me some months, but the more I saw it, the more I resented it. 

And so I told him, “Look, you have to leave.” And then the other scientists in that task force attacked me for being anti-scientific. And I asked them: “What are your connections with all of this?” They didn’t tell me. Then when the Freedom of Information Act released some of these documents that NIH had been hiding from the public, I saw that people that were attacking me were also part of this thing. So I disbanded that whole task force. So my own experience was to witness close up how they’re not talking. And they’re trying to keep our eyes on something else. And away from even asking the questions that we’re talking about. We don’t have the answers. But we have good reasons to ask. And we have good reasons to know that NIH is not doing its job properly right now.] (6)

So, here we sit in July 2022, with key documents still being withheld by the government agencies which supposedly serve us, while a million Americans are dead and perhaps as many as 20 million worldwide, and with our government funding an expanded virus hunting effort.

Which brings me to Dr Anthony Fauci and his role at NIAID.  Dr Fauci is a 21st century version of J Edgar Hoover and his long reign at the FBI.(7)  I wrote in March:

Once Fauci is gone, I am convinced, if anyone investigates, we will find many scandals at NIAID, just as we did at the FBI after Hoover's death.  Dr Fauci's reign is a prime example of letting an executive run a government agency for decades while escaping accountability.  The doctor last treated patients 51 years ago; has been a senior executive at NIAID for 48 years; and run the agency for the past 38 years.  Every manager in that organization owes their job and their future to Dr Fauci.  Nothing is done without his direct approval or approval by his devotees.  NIAID has a $6 billion budget, a large portion of which goes to funding virology research.  Fauci is the largest funder of such research in the U.S. and possibly the world.  Research careers are dependent upon the doctor's favor.  When Josh Rogin [foreign policy correspondent at the Washington Post] wrote Chaos Under Heaven, his book on the Trump's administration's China policy [for more on this excellent book, read my review], he reported that he was unable to get virologists to speak on the record about Fauci and the origins of Covid because of his control of their funding. (8)

And just like Hoover ran the FBI with an iron fist, involved at every level of decision making, Fauci shares with the former FBI Director a skilled sense of public relations and cultivation of the media, along with a dedicated public fan base that will quickly jump to his defense in response to any perceived challenge to his authority, and like Hoover, Fauci greatly enjoys the publicity and adoration he receives. In Fauci's case, he had the added advantage of establishing his credibility by contrasting himself to the eccentric and ignorant musings of President Trump in their joint press conferences during the early days of Covid.

Dr Fauci position has changed over time from ridiculing any notion of a lab leak origin to, when pressed, tepidly endorsing an investigation of Covid origins but, as the skilled bureaucrat he is, doing nothing to enable such investigation knowing that the current Congressional leadership has absolutely no interest in any investigation that might undermine Dr Fauci's reputation.  The doctor's interest is in smothering any thorough and objective look at this possibility.  Why? (9)

How many virologists are truly convinced that a lab origin hypothesis is not worth investigating?

Can their reasons withstand open inquiry?

Is there a fear that the type of research advocated by the virus hunters could have directly or indirectly led to the pandemic?

Is there a fear that if it did happen, that funding for such research could dry up? 

How has Fauci's control over virology funding impacted the willingness of virologists to speak out?

Maybe some day we will find out.

Could I be wrong with my default assumption about causation?  Sure.  But not about the lab leak being a worthwhile avenue of investigation.

The one thing I am certain of is that the out of hand dismissal of a possible lab leak; when the lab in question was the world largest investigator of bat coronaviruses; where it is possible that research involving the specific characteristics found in the Covid-19 genome may have been conducted; located in the very city where the pandemic began; when no other intermediate source has been identified; and when proponents of the lab leak hypothesis are smeared as racist, conspiracy theorists, is a disgrace to those in the virology community who have propounded this nonsense for the past two years, and yet another example of the self-destruction of our institutions.

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(1) Looking at the USAID press release I was surprised to find the current administrator of the agency is none other than Samantha Power, an outstanding example of a person with certain talents that are a complete mismatch to the government positions she has filled.  Ms Power wrote a fine book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2003), about the complexities of dealing with genocidal incidents like the massacre of the Tutsi in Rwanda during the 1990s.  The problems for Ms Power arose when she turned to doing policy and implementation.  She became one of the leading proponents of Responsibility to Protect, which boiled down to a doctrine under which the United States should actively intervene in other countries to protect human rights, but should not intervene to advance its own interests (I'm sure she would rephrase this as "protecting human rights is in American interests, but intervention to protect other U.S. interests bad").  During the Obama administration she served as Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council and later as Ambassador to the United Nations, where, along with Hillary Clinton she was among the leading voices for the disastrous Western intervention in Libya, where we deposed a deplorable, but under control, dictator who had surrendered his nuclear program, and ended with the chaotic rule of warlords who have caused a decade of civil war, hosted terrorist groups, and triggered a mass migration of illegal immigrants into Europe.

(2) Since everything seems to have a political aspect now, I'll note that all of the Senators asking questions are Republicans.  I do not know the political affiliations of the other two panelists, but having been reading Dr Ebright's twitter feed for several months, it is evident he is a strong Democrat.

(3) In addition to the public release of information during SARS, my work in the safety and health fields put me in touch with China government officials involved with the outbreak and my conversations with them were consistent with the public explanations.  I'll add this was at a time when I was more optimistic about what China's future might be and its relations with the U.S.  Those days are long over.  I also had interesting discussions with officials at the National Development and Reform Commission (then the country's leading policy organization) about climate change and energy, but that's for another day and another post.

(4) This action has raised suspicion that the WIV may have become aware of something going wrong with its lab activities well-before the first reported Covid-19 cases (depending on the source, in either late November or early December).

(5) Even now, it is not uncommon for some to excuse the propaganda campaign by referencing Trump's supposed rhetoric but this gets the timetable wrong.  As Josh Rogin points out in Chaos Under Heaven, the racist conspiracy theory campaign was launched in early February 2020, at a time when Trump was focused on what he thought would be the triumphant announcement of a trade deal with China and he was doing everything he could to placate Xi Jingping and downplaying the covid threat.  It was only in mid-March, after Trump realized Xi was playing him for a patsy that he first referenced the "Wuhan flu" and it was only in mid-April that the administration first spoke publicly about a possible leak at WIV.  Another "fake news" story from this period was Senator Tom Cotton's statement that "We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”  This was twisted by the NY Times and WaPo into an assertion that China deliberately engineered and released the virus, allowing reporters to denounce it as a racist conspiracy theory.  By the way, we also now know that much of the work at WIV was being conducted at BSL-2, not at the more rigorous BSL-4.

(6) Sachs is director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University in the US and president of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network.  I am very cautious in dealing with anything from Dr Sachs.  In 2005-6, I attended, as my company's representative, meetings of his climate change group at Columbia's Earth Institute, and heard him expound at length as well as having a couple of brief conversations with him.  I find him to be instantly dismissive of alternative viewpoints and incredibly arrogant, with a firm belief that the most complex problems in our world can be easily solved if only he were put in change with full decision-making authority.  That's been a consistent theme in his career whether it's his economic recovery theories for the former Soviet Union and its satellites in the 1990s or in the failure of the UN Millenium Development Goals in which he was instrumental.  

In this case, everything Sachs is saying that can be verified, I have verified.  For instance, I've seen the FOIA materials that have been released, which include huge amounts of redacted material (I've even looked at the 290 redacted pages describing NIH's SARS research workplan) being withheld in what I believe is blatant violation of the law.  However, keep in mind that Sachs is a consistent critic of America and its foreign policy and most of his criticism around covid is directed at America, not China.  This is perhaps not surprising as he is an advocate of closer ties with China.

(7) Hoover began working at what was then called the Bureau of Investigation in 1921, becoming Director in 1924, a position he maintained until his death in 1972.  Fauci has worked at NIAID for 54 years, three years more than Hoover was at the FBI, though Hoover headed the agency for a decade longer than Fauci.  At least, so far.

(8) Rereading this last sentence it is not as clear as I should have been.  Rogin stated he was unable to get any virologist to speak on the record, and most refused to even comment off the record.  The few who spoke off the record limited their comments to pointing out that Fauci controls the funding in the field.

(9) There are aspects of the Covid origin story that remind me of an incident that started in 1979.  In that year an anthrax outbreak occurred in Sverdlovsk, Soviet Union in which 65 people died.  Soviet authorities blamed the outbreak on the consumption of tainted meat.  There were suspicions in the U.S. about the outbreak as Sverdlovsk was a closed city and major production center for the Soviet military-industrial complex.  It also, as it turned out, housed the Scientific-Research Institute of Bacterial Vaccine Preparations, given that name in 1974, a facility which started in the late 1940s as a biological warfare plant.

In 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union, along with 20 other countries, agreed to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) banning biological and toxic weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use.  There are now 184 signatories to the BWC.

During the 1980s there was a growing controversy over the Sverdlovsk outbreak, with the Reagan Administration taking the position that the likely source was the former bioweapons facility, while other prominent figures in the U.S. accepted the Soviet explanation of tainted meat and I still remember the debate. Among these was Dr Matthew Meselson of Harvard University.  Professor Meselson is a renowned geneticist and molecular biologist, who since the early 1960s played a prominent role in advocating for biological and chemical weapons controls.  His reputation was such that he was brought in to help convince President Nixon to sign the Biological Weapons Convention.

In 1979, Meselson was asked by the CIA to evaluate the Soviet claim and he concurred with the tainted meat explanation.  Seven years later he was allowed by Soviet authorities to visit Sverdlovsk and conduct interviews and again concluded that the tainted meat theory was the most likely explanation.

From everything I saw at the time, and have read, since I believe Dr Meselson is a person of high integrity (I do not hold the same opinion of Dr Fauci, nor were the funding, financial, and career conflict issues present in the Sverdlovsk incident) but there was also a political context to the controversy.  Many opponents of President Reagan were fearful that his confrontation with the Soviet Union would lead to disaster and wanted to defuse any possible triggers to such an outcome and were willing to grant the Soviets more credibility in that regard.  Dr Meselson and others also had a great interest in demonstrating the viability of biological weapons controls.  The result was Reagan was often portrayed as a fearmonger and ideologue, with the result, as in many of the disputes of this type, with everyone aligning with their preferred positions.

For whatever reason, Dr Meselson's conclusions, which carried a great deal of weight, particularly with the opponents of Reagan and the media, were incorrect.  After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Meselson returned to Sverdlovsk where he had full access to people and documents and concluded that the 1979 outbreak was due to an accidental release of anthrax from a Soviet biological weapons facility.

It turned out the Soviet Union, in violation of the BWC, had a large biological weapons program, which actually expanded under Gorbachev in the 1980s.  Soviet scientists who expressed misgivings about the program were assured that it was necessary since the U.S. was also violating the BWC.  In reality, the U.S. had shut down its programs after signing the BWC.  Within the Nixon Administration there had been a lot of opposition to signing the convention, but when opponents met with President Nixon, complaining that if the Soviets attacked the U.S. with biological weapons we would be unable to respond in a similar way, Nixon simply said, "Well, we'll just nuke them".