Irreal has long been suspicious about the back story of COVID-19. As I’ve written before, if you put on your scientific hat, the only possible conclusion is that there’s not yet any definite resolution to covid-19’s genesis. But if you think about it as an intelligent, knowledgeable citizen, the story being flogged by the press and the various governments involved just doesn’t pass the smell test. The unremitting insistence that any explanation other than the zoonotic one was a conspiracy theory and that there was nothing to see, please move on, left even the least cynical of folks wondering what was going on.
Now the coverup is beginning to unravel. Two recent revelations herald the unraveling. The first is a paper by Buttel, Washburne, and VanDongen claiming that an endonuclease fingerprint of the virus indicates that it was synthetic. That means, of course, that the lab leak hypothesis that many felt was the best explanation of COVID-19 is correct. If you know a little biology or chemistry, this article by Anandamide steps you through the analysis and even points you at the SnapGene Viewer tool that helps you with the analysis.
The second is a joint ProPublica/Vanity Fair article that reports on an extensive Senate investigation of documents obtained from Wuhan laboratory that strongly suggests that there was a serious biosecurity breach at the Wuhan labs just prior to the emergence of COVID-19. The story is very complex and involves plumbing the mind numbing depths of Chinese Communist “Party Speak”. Read the article for details. It’s long and complex but worth your attention.
That (even) the U.S. officials responsible for enabling and covering up this debacle will be brought to justice is probably too much to hope for but we can at least hope for an end to the dangerous and probably useless gain-of-function research before it manages to kill us all.