A big screen documentary movie, an announcement, and an exclusive excerpt from "Lab Leak Fever", the definitive book unraveling the pandemic origin controversy
This is a great read, and you’ve written a page turner for anyone following COVID origins, and the cast of characters who emerged in its wake. I also appreciate your original reporting, getting interviews with two of the top Chinese scientists, George Gao and Shi Zhengli, and letting us see a glimpse into their thinking.
One suggested edit, unless you are read into the highest levels at every lab in the world, your writing, “no unknown virus ever leaked from a high biosafety lab” is likely not a sentence you can back up. Nor can you definitely write, as you do, that no BSL-4 worked with “random” bat viruses vs. “known.”
Those details are, as they say, known unknowns.
Even in the US, as Alison Young’s investigative reporting for Pandora’s Gamble shows, it’s not public what was in the untreated biolab wastewater that went spilling out of the USAMRIID biolab tanks in 2018 and onto the lab’s grounds, likely into Frederick, Maryland’s waterways.
CDC shut that lab down because of if its safety problems, details of which are still secret. Someone knows, but they haven’t shared what viruses, if any, were in USAMRIID’s BSL-3 & BSL-4 leaking biolab water, so, again, saying a virus has “never” leaked, as you do, currently is not even verifiable for US labs.
In addition, it’s known that labs worked on unpublished bat viruses, bat virus chimeras, or their parts, before COVID. RML has a BSL-4, they had live bats and did unpublished coronavirus work. Has RML given you details about their BSL-4 work and the sequences and RBD’s they worked on? NIH went to court to fight releasing their RML coronavirus secrets and thus even the coronavirus work at this NIH intramural, DOD-funded, US lab are not fully or publicly known.
Your paragraph for suggested edits is below. Hope you find someone to publish the entire book in English, as it would contribute to the debate and discussion.
Secrets are still out there, as is the original host species, it’s said.
Congrats on your book.
“However, BSL-4 labs only work with known, very dangerous pathogens, not random bat viruses whose pathogenicity has not been characterized yet. Ordinary bat viruses cannot infect humans, so they could be studied under BSL-2 at the time. But the high-security BSL-4 sounded more dangerous, so it was good for headlines. That any such proposed lab accident from a BSL-4 lab would have, by necessity, required knowledge and documentation of this hitherto unseen virus first, or that no unknown virus ever leaked from a high biosafety lab, was conveniently withheld from readers.”
This is a great read, and you’ve written a page turner for anyone following COVID origins, and the cast of characters who emerged in its wake. I also appreciate your original reporting, getting interviews with two of the top Chinese scientists, George Gao and Shi Zhengli, and letting us see a glimpse into their thinking.
One suggested edit, unless you are read into the highest levels at every lab in the world, your writing, “no unknown virus ever leaked from a high biosafety lab” is likely not a sentence you can back up. Nor can you definitely write, as you do, that no BSL-4 worked with “random” bat viruses vs. “known.”
Those details are, as they say, known unknowns.
Even in the US, as Alison Young’s investigative reporting for Pandora’s Gamble shows, it’s not public what was in the untreated biolab wastewater that went spilling out of the USAMRIID biolab tanks in 2018 and onto the lab’s grounds, likely into Frederick, Maryland’s waterways.
CDC shut that lab down because of if its safety problems, details of which are still secret. Someone knows, but they haven’t shared what viruses, if any, were in USAMRIID’s BSL-3 & BSL-4 leaking biolab water, so, again, saying a virus has “never” leaked, as you do, currently is not even verifiable for US labs.
In addition, it’s known that labs worked on unpublished bat viruses, bat virus chimeras, or their parts, before COVID. RML has a BSL-4, they had live bats and did unpublished coronavirus work. Has RML given you details about their BSL-4 work and the sequences and RBD’s they worked on? NIH went to court to fight releasing their RML coronavirus secrets and thus even the coronavirus work at this NIH intramural, DOD-funded, US lab are not fully or publicly known.
Your paragraph for suggested edits is below. Hope you find someone to publish the entire book in English, as it would contribute to the debate and discussion.
Secrets are still out there, as is the original host species, it’s said.
Congrats on your book.
“However, BSL-4 labs only work with known, very dangerous pathogens, not random bat viruses whose pathogenicity has not been characterized yet. Ordinary bat viruses cannot infect humans, so they could be studied under BSL-2 at the time. But the high-security BSL-4 sounded more dangerous, so it was good for headlines. That any such proposed lab accident from a BSL-4 lab would have, by necessity, required knowledge and documentation of this hitherto unseen virus first, or that no unknown virus ever leaked from a high biosafety lab, was conveniently withheld from readers.”
Thank you for this thoughtful comment.
In amended the sentence with "no unknown virus ever leaked from a high biosafety lab to the best of our knowledge".
The book has at the beginning a disclaimer that clarifies a bit the standpoint, will add this here is well.
Thanks
If you want to clear Shi, Gao, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, ask them to confirm that there are no Syrian hamsters in her BSL2:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2342-5
Chinese labs usually have Chinese hamsters, which don't transmit Covid:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.626553/full