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

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

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