Welcome to my personal website. It contains all my web writings since 2009.

The Future of the Lab Leak Theory

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By Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

This text was originally posted as a Twitter/X thread. We are reposting it (minus a few typos) as a short essay.

1/ Many people on Twitter are, like Nicholas Wade, wondering if the latest DEFUSE grant revelations from @emilyakopp and @USRTK are maybe the last word on the great #covidorigin #lableak debate. They are not.

2/ Why? Because they only deepen the mystery. The short answer is that six hallmark sites of reverse engineering identified by Bruttel et al: (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1) only explain 0.1% or less of the #SARS-CoV-2 genome.More

The Great Raccoon Dog Mystery

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ECV2023

by Jonathan Latham, PhD
Anyone sincerely seeking to avoid a repeat of the COVID19 pandemic is faced with two mysteries. Both of them need urgent answers. One mystery is the obvious one: Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from? The second mystery is this: Why, if they are as confident as they say they are that the pandemic began with a zoonosis, are so many individuals, institutions, and countries so reluctant to properly investigate that origin? This second mystery, though so-far less considered, may turn out to be much more significant than the origin itself.More

Did West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak of 2014 Have a Lab Origin?

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by Sam Husseini and Jonathan Latham, PhD

Between 2014 and 2016, West Africa endured an Ebola epidemic that was easily the largest and deadliest in history. Over 29,000 people were infected and more than 11,000 died in what was also an economic and social calamity.

The countries most afflicted were Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea; but lives were also lost far afield. Ebola cases were detected in Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Spain, the UK, and the U.S. This international spread unleashed its own, albeit fairly short-lived, panic.More

Fauci’s COVID Origin SWAT Team Versus the Mojiang Miner Passage Theory

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD

On February 1st, 2020, Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), secretly convened a group of select international virologists. Their task was to decide whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus newly emerged from Wuhan, was engineered.

Some key emails from their resulting discussions have only recently become available. In one, Robert Garry, a virologist from Tulane University, wrote to his associates: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning.” Other emails show that many in the group agreed that the virus likely did not emerge naturally and most probably was altered in a lab.More

Delete, Deny, and Destroy: Chinese and Western Strategies To Erase COVID’s Origin Are Being Exposed By Independent Research

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

The task of every COVID-19 origin theory is to explain a human outbreak in Wuhan, China, when the closest wild relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are located far away, 1700 km to the South West.

In public, virologists have tended to say that the proximity of the outbreak to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which uniquely specialises in collecting, studying, and enhancing, SARS-related coronaviruses, is a coincidence. More

Talk: The Mojiang Miners Passage Theory and the Lab Origin Question

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On October 7th, 2021, I gave a presentation at the latest #covidunknowns workshop organised by the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The workshop was titled “Origins of Covid” and the talk was titled: “The Mojiang Miners Passage Theory and the Lab Origin Question”. I gave a brief overview of key origin questions and of the Mojiang Miners Passage (MMP) theory. I also expanded on the greatly accelerated virus evolution seen in some hospitalized long-term Covid-19 patients that is thought to give rise to new variants. Such cases appear to provide clues to what may have occurred in the infected miners in 2012.

My talk begins at 50 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLSv4Iwk_jM&t=2988s

Information on the BMJ’s Covid-19 webinar series and links to previous workshops: https://www.bmj.com/covid-19-webinars

Mojiang Miners Passage Theory :
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/
An update based on the implications of new discoveries: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/phylogeographic-mapping-of-newly-discovered-coronaviruses-pinpoints-direct-progenitor-of-sars-cov-2-as-originating-from-mojiang/

Phylogeographic Mapping of Newly Discovered Coronaviruses Pinpoints the Direct Progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 as Originating from Mojiang, China

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

Back in March, the World Health Organisation’s report on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic coronavirus confirmed something that had long been widely presumed. Since the pandemic began, there has been an enormous virus hunt in China.

The purpose of this hunt has been to find the viruses intermediate between SARS-CoV-2 and its coronavirus relatives found in bats (Luk et al., 2019).More

A Chinese PhD Thesis Sheds Important New Light On The Origin of the COVID-19 Coronavirus

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

One of the very earliest scientific papers from the COVID-19 pandemic era now has over 11,000 citations. Appearing in the scientific journal Nature on February 3rd 2020, Zhou et al., 2020 reported the genome sequence of a novel coronavirus isolated from patients with atypical pneumonia in Wuhan, China. Its senior author was leading coronavirus researcher Zheng-li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the WIV). Along with what we now call SARS-CoV-2, her paper also reported the genome sequence of a closely related (96.2% identical) bat virus. The authors called this virus RaTG13. To this day RaTG13 is still the closest known viral genome by far to SARS-CoV-2.

RaTG13 came from the freezers of the WIV.More

Agriculture’s Greatest Myth

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by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Sustainable, local, organic food grown on small farms has a tremendous amount to offer. Unlike chemical-intensive industrial-scale agriculture, it regenerates rural communities; it doesn’t pollute rivers and groundwater or create dead zones; it can save coral reefs; it doesn’t encroach on rainforests; it preserves soil and it can restore the climate (IAASTD, 2009). Why do all governments not promote it?More

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