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Opinion

Did Covid-19 come from a lab? – UnHerd

[T]he theory that the virus was cooked-up in a lab and accidentally released isn’t just a possibility, it’s the most likely explanation.

….What’s so compelling about Wade’s deep-dive is that he shows how the key details are easier to explain within the context of a lab leak origin. He doesn’t claim that they definitively rule out a natural origin — just that it’s more of a stretch to get all the pieces to fit together.

https://unherd.com/thepost/did-covid-19-come-from-a-lab/

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News

In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened – Politico

By April, U.S. officials at the NSC and the State Department had begun to compile circumstantial evidence that the WIV lab, rather than the seafood market, was actually the source of the virus. The former explanation for the outbreak was entirely plausible, they felt, whereas the latter would be an extreme coincidence. But the officials couldn’t say that out loud because there wasn’t firm proof either way. And if the U.S. government accused China of lying about the outbreak without firm evidence, Beijing would surely escalate tensions even more, which meant that Americans might not get the medical supplies that were desperately needed to combat the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322

Categories
Opinion

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis – Did the Coronavirus Escape from a Lab? – New York Magazine

hat happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210104114538/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html

Categories
News

Iranian Doctors Urge Neighbours to Liquidate Any US Biological Labs Amid Coronavirus Fears – Sputnik News

A group of 101 Iranian doctors has penned a letter addressed to the leaders of Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan to take ‘immediate action’ to destroy “all of the US biological laboratories” in their countries amid fears that the coronavirus pandemic may have been spread deliberately as a form of biological warfare, Press TV has reported, citing the letter.

http://archive.today/2021.10.23-110640/https://sputniknews.com/20200319/iranian-doctors-urge-neighbours-to-liquidate-any-us-biological-labs-amid-coronavirus-fears-1078623300.html