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Covid could have been created by a “research-related incident”, the UN has heard at the launch of a report calling for better regulation of experiments that could spark pandemics.
Dr Filippa Lentzos, an associate professor of science and international security at King’s College London, said it was important to acknowledge the pandemic may have been started by scientists.
The comments were made at the launch of a report by the Independent Task Force on Research with Pandemic Risks, which is calling for better regulations on science that puts large numbers of people in danger.
Speaking at the UN in New York, Dr Lentzos, a member of the task force, said: “We have to acknowledge the fact that the pandemic could have started from some research-related incident.
“Are we going to find that out? In my view, I think it’s very unlikely that we will. We need to do better in future. We are going to see more ambiguous events.
“There will be an outbreak and we won’t know if it’s natural, deliberate or accidental and as an international community we need to find ways in which we can investigate that.
“For our purposes what is important we need to acknowledge that it could have been, and so what should your responses be.”
Covid appeared eight miles from lab --->READ MORE HERE
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COVID-19 may have been created in a Chinese lab, a British professor told the UN Wednesday, with another expert claiming that evidence of the likelihood has reached “the level of a smoking gun.”
Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, was quoted saying in a new Wall Street Journal article that the virus that killed millions around the world may actually have been manmade in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He cited evidence found in a 2018 document from the lab that talked of making such a virus.
“[The document] elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of noteworthy to the level of a smoking gun,” Ebright said in the piece by former New York Times editor Nicholas Wade.
The papers from the lab cited by Ebright contained drafts and notes regarding a grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, which sought to test engineering bat coronaviruses in a way that would make them more easily transmissible to humans.
The proposal was ultimately rejected and denied funding by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but Wade suggested that their work could have been carried out by researchers in Wuhan who had secured Chinese government funding.
“Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019,” wrote Wade, a former science editor of the New York Times. “This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin.”
Along with the research notes, Wade claimed the specific genetic structure of the coronavirus that allowed it to infect humans served as another strong indication of “the virus’s laboratory birth.”
“Whereas most viruses require repeated tries to switch from an animal host to people, SARS-CoV-2 infected humans out of the box, as if it had been preadapted while growing in the humanized mice called for in the DEFUSE protocol,” Wade wrote. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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