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Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory
Spiked-online ^ | January 12, 2022 | Matt Ridley

Posted on 01/17/2022 11:09:28 AM PST by Grandpa Drudge

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

(Excerpt) Read more at spiked-online.com ...


TOPICS: AMERICA - The Right Way!!; Health/Medicine; Science
KEYWORDS: covid19; covidlies; mandates; political; propaganda
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Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private.

https://republicans-oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Letter-Re.-Feb-1-Emails-011122.pdf

1 posted on 01/17/2022 11:09:28 AM PST by Grandpa Drudge
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Because Fauci transferred the gain to function research and funding to China and created this pandemic.


2 posted on 01/17/2022 11:11:53 AM PST by Lurkinanloomin ( (Natural born citizens are born here of citizen parents)(Know Islam, No Peace-No Islam, Know Peace)
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Heh.

Imo, the “lab leak” is nothing more than the final fallback, last line defensive spin story trying desperately to confuse the reality that this was all on purpose. Nothing leaked. It was released in multiple geo-locations, North Italy, UK, US, China, etc, as planned.

“Oh, please please please please believe it was all just an accident!”


3 posted on 01/17/2022 11:14:25 AM PST by Grimmy (equivocation is but the first step along the road to capitulation)
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Scientists did not suppress the lab leak theory.

Certain political players did.


4 posted on 01/17/2022 11:17:26 AM PST by ifinnegan (Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell)
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Because Dr Fubar helped to fund the virus that has killed so many šŸ¤Ŗ


5 posted on 01/17/2022 11:19:51 AM PST by NWFree (Somebody has to say it)
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To: Grandpa Drudge
In August 2020 Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were among the lead investigators to receive $8.9million to study emerging infectious diseases, in a grant from Anthony Fauciā€™s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of Francis Collins's National Institutes of Health.

$8.9 million reasons why they turned tail and backed off their initial beliefs. D.C. loves a good quid pro quo.

6 posted on 01/17/2022 11:21:09 AM PST by liberalh8ter (The only difference between flash mob 'urban yutes' and U.S. politicians is the hoodies.)
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To: Grandpa Drudge
Why did scientists the Chinese suppress the lab-leak theory

Because we now would be debating, not whether we should wear one mask or two, but rather whether Red China owed us $5 trillion or $8 trillion in reparations.

Regards,

7 posted on 01/17/2022 11:21:15 AM PST by alexander_busek (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.)
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Money money money moneyā€¦.money moneyā€¦ā€¦money


8 posted on 01/17/2022 11:24:05 AM PST by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancerā€)
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To: NWFree

Eventually all if the really nasty and permanent side effects will begin to manifest themselves. Might be 5,6,7 years but eventually they will be of such magnitude that the cause and effect will be obvious. These lying bastards will no longer be able to deflect the blame and there will be a reckoning.


9 posted on 01/17/2022 11:27:00 AM PST by technically right
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Beause they could go to prison over what they did.


10 posted on 01/17/2022 11:31:40 AM PST by BradyLS (DO NOT FEED THE BEARS!)
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Why did you excerpt this article? It’s not on the Excerpt-only list. And your excerpt doesn’t even answer the question poised in the title.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/12/why-did-scientists-suppress-the-lab-leak-theory/

Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?
In private, they said it was plausible. In public, they called it a conspiracy theory.

MATT RIDLEY
12th January 2022
Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?
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In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the worldā€™s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.

In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the worldā€™s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Jeremy Farrar ā€“ who organised the call on 1 February with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and a Whoā€™s Who of virology ā€“ had already spilled a few of the beans in his book, Spike, published last year. He wrote that at the start of February 2020 he thought there was a 50 per cent chance the virus was engineered, while Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute was at 60-70 per cent and Eddie Holmes of Sydney University put it at 80 per cent. But some time after the call they all changed their mind. Why? They have never troubled us with an answer.

Now, however, we have an email from Farrar, sent on Sunday 2 February to Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It recounts the overnight thoughts of two other virologists Farrar had consulted, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute, as well as Farrarā€™s own thoughts. Even after the call, their concern centred on a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that had never been seen in any other SARS-like coronavirus before: the insertion (compared with the closest related virus in bats) of a 12-letter genetic sequence that creates a thing called a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus much more infectious.

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Farzan, said Farrar, ā€˜has a hard time to explain that outside the labā€™ and Garry ā€˜canā€™t think of a plausible natural scenarioā€¦ canā€™t figure out how this gets accomplished in natureā€™. Farrar himself thought, on that Sunday, that ā€˜a likely explanation could be something as simple as passage [of] SARS-like CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines (under BSL-2) for an extended period of time, accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans via gain of furin site (from tissue culture) and adaption to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passageā€™. Translated: repeatedly growing a virus in human cells in a lab will alter its genome through natural selection so it adapts to human hosts.

These are the very suspicions raised in April 2020 in a careful essay by Russian-Canadian biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin, which was dismissed at the time by Garry and the others as nonsense. In a very different line from the one they expressed in private, they argued, in the influential paper that Andersen, Garry and Holmes co-authored with two other virologists, that furin-cleavage-site insertions could arise naturally and one would soon be found in a virus in a wild bat.

Two years later, no such natural furin-cleavage-site insertion has yet turned up in the many wild SARS-like viruses found since then. But what has turned up is a grant proposal put to the USā€™s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018 to fund experiments that would deliberately insert novel furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-like coronaviruses to help them grow in the lab. And who was party to that proposal? Why, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Indeed, it had already done a similar experiment with the spike protein of a MERS-like virus a few years before. Itā€™s not quite a smoking gun, because the proposal was turned down, but itā€™s an open secret in science that you sometimes put things into grant proposals that you have already started doing, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences was funding most of the work in the Wuhan Institute of Virology anyway.

The emails unveiled this week reveal no good scientific reason at all for why these leading virologists changed their minds and became deniers rather than believers in even the remote possibility of a lab leak, all in just a few days in February 2020. No new data, no new arguments. But they do very clearly reveal a blatant political reason for the volte-face. Speculating about a lab leak, said Ron Fouchier, a Dutch researcher, might ā€˜do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particularā€™. Francis Collins was pithier, worrying about ā€˜doing great potential harm to science and international harmonyā€™. Contradicting Donald Trump, protecting scienceā€™s reputation at all costs and keeping in with those who dole out large grants are pretty strong incentives to change oneā€™s mind.

Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?
RECOMMENDED
Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?
MATT RIDLEY
In August 2020 Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were among the lead investigators to receive $8.9million to study emerging infectious diseases, in a grant from Anthony Fauciā€™s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of Francis Collinsā€™s National Institutes of Health.

Matt Ridley is co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, with Alina Chan.


11 posted on 01/17/2022 11:32:37 AM PST by Kevmo (Iā€™m immune from Covid since I donā€™t watch TV.šŸ¤—)
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To: Grandpa Drudge

It also hurt Trump. If it was a mistake from the China government, people would have rallied around Trump.


12 posted on 01/17/2022 11:35:56 AM PST by alternatives? (The only reason to have an army is to defend your borders.)
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To: Grimmy
It was released in multiple geo-locations
Personally, I think it was a co-ordinated effort between the Chinese and the Democrats as a way to damage Trump. Without something, (other than the massive cheating they DID pull off) , he was heading to re-election in a landslide. (and, without the cheating, WAS reelected)
The whole way China handled this, not allowing any Wuhan folks to travel in China, but SENDING them out around the world, reeks of a planned scenario.

13 posted on 01/17/2022 11:39:54 AM PST by Karma_Sherab
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Answer: to protect Fauci


14 posted on 01/17/2022 11:56:58 AM PST by oil_dude
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Didn’t Bill Gates leak it, even before the lab?


15 posted on 01/17/2022 11:58:15 AM PST by sanjuanbob
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To: Grandpa Drudge

Obama defunded US hyperviralization. I actually thought i agreed with him.
If you think there was only one lab and one virus, think again.
This, my friends is how to make a better vaccine, always has been.


16 posted on 01/17/2022 11:58:58 AM PST by momincombatboots (Ephesians 6... who you are really at war with. )
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To: Grandpa Drudge

The virus seems to have been engineered to spread and devastate the world. It’s man made. I don’t know if it was released on purpose.


17 posted on 01/17/2022 11:59:14 AM PST by I want the USA back (Government is to be feared much more than the chicom virus.)
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To: Grandpa Drudge

It wasn’t leaked, it was released. China had a bad problem with riots in Wuhan and Hong Kong in late summer and fall of 2019. The riots ran the risk of spreading. Trump was cruising to reelection and the tariffs were hurting China and US Globalists.

It was released on purpose. “Lab leak” is a fallback position. They WANTED us to believe it was natural.

It was on purpose, for the benefit of China and the DC party.


18 posted on 01/17/2022 11:59:36 AM PST by DesertRhino (Dogs are called man's best friend. Moslems hate dogs. Add it up....)
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To: Grimmy

Exactly!


19 posted on 01/17/2022 12:00:10 PM PST by DesertRhino (Dogs are called man's best friend. Moslems hate dogs. Add it up....)
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To: Kevmo
You ask Why did you excerpt this article?

Strange question. My "excerpt" simply highlights what I consider to be the most important point in the article.

Furthermore, my actual post (#1) highlights the most pertinent link contained within the article, which presents the letter from Congress to HHS secretary Xavier Becerra with attached actual email evidence that supports the question.

Maybe you don't realize the link you provided is exactly the same link provided with the excerpt cited in my post.

20 posted on 01/17/2022 12:15:10 PM PST by Grandpa Drudge (Just an old man, desperate to preserve our great country for my great grandchildren.)
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