#COVID 19 ORIGIN PROFESSIONAL#

We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a research company that got substantial NIH funding for its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, joined 26 other scientists in signing a remarkable letter that March 7 to The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal.Ī statement of solidarity with China’s health professionals who were battling COVID-19, it reads, in part:Ĭonspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.

#COVID 19 ORIGIN PROFESSIONAL#

Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nicholas Wade reports that in March 2020, leading virologists and medical scientists, including those who had received NIH funding, tried to debunk the alleged “conspiracy theory” in letters to two professional journals, The Lancet and Nature Medicine. Opinion positing an “unnatural” origin for the virus that causes COVID-19 quickly became unfashionable at NIH and elsewhere. Robert Garry, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane University School of Medicine, one of Farrar’s colleagues, said there was no “plausible” scenario that such a virus developed in nature in the way the novel coronavirus did.

Lawrence Tabak, NIH’s principal deputy director.įor example, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Dr. officials at the National Institutes of Health and EcoHealth Alliance, a research organization funded by NIH since 2014 that had worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Communist China.īritish scientist Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust conveyed some skepticism among his colleagues over the idea that the virus had a natural origin in his email Feb. James Comer, R-Ky., and colleagues on the House Oversight and Reform Committee have been looking into the connection between U.S. Instead, there is no evidence that any animal was infected with SARS-CoV-2 prior to the first human cases.Īt the same time, Rep. If the COVID-19 pandemic is the result of the zoonotic spillover of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan from an intermediate host species, there should be evidence of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in animals before it spilled over into humans. Most importantly, the Senate report clarifies what we don’t know, saying: The Senate report details the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a center of China’s intense, bat-based coronavirus research, the strange genetic features of the novel coronavirus, and the Wuhan lab’s troubled history of biosecurity problems. It is comprehensive and detailed, heavily citing (in 225 footnotes) various reports and the professional, peer-reviewed literature. It is a careful and measured presentation.

The 35-page report from GOP staff of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is a refreshing exception to the heated rhetoric that mars COVID-19 debates. This conclusion is not intended to be dispositive. While precedent of previous outbreaks of human infections from contact with animals favors the hypothesis that a natural zoonotic spillover is responsible for the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the emergence SARS-CoV-2 that resulted in the pandemic was most likely the result of a research-related incident. In an “Interim Report” dated October 2022, the Republican staff concludes: Minority staff of a key Senate committee, however, just took a big step forward in solving the mystery. The origin of COVID-19-whether natural or the product of a lab-is a crucial yet unresolved issue.

Covid 19 origin