“The blame is on the Chinese regime no matter how COVID-19 arose, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said on June 18.” This is the lede from “‘China’s to Blame’ Regardless of How COVID-19 Came About, Senator Says,” by Eva Fu, June 19th in The Epoch Times.
“Since the virus emerged from China’s Wuhan city and ballooned into a global pandemic,” writes Ms. Fu, “Beijing has repeatedly deflected responsibility, demanding critics look elsewhere around the world for possible sources of the disease.
“It has meanwhile muffled whistleblowers and refused to hand full data to outside investigators, including experts of the World Health Organization, even as it proclaims itself ‘open and transparent’ on the origins issue.”
Ms. Fu’s article goes on to quote Dr. Robert Garry and Gregory Koblenz, both of whom continue to push the zoonotic origin theory, both complaining about China’s opacity and evasions on the origins issue. Their complaint is marred, however, by the former’s participation in what many think of as Antony Fauci’s Wuhan Cover-up, the Nature article “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
Against such possibly conspiratorial maneuvers, Fu quotes Dr. Steven Quay, founder of Atossa Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical firm, who “pointed to circumstantial evidence such as the Wuhan lab’s links to the military, the takedown of the lab’s virus sequence database in September 2019, and the shipment of vials of dangerous pathogens to the lab before the outbreak as factors that raised his suspicions.
Dr. Quay also noted the proteins of opening reading frame 8 in the SARS-CoV-2 genome, an accessory protein that researchers say functions to block one’s body from presenting symptoms of infection, which he described as “highly unusual” and “highly synthetic.”
“The probability that SARS-2 came from nature, based on these features, is one in a billion,” he said.
With no definitive evidence on the virus’s origin, lawmakers and witnesses at the hearing agree that there should be stricter guardrails over gain-of-function research, or the manipulation of a pathogen that can enhance its pandemic potential.
But it’s hard to come up with a “definitive” conclusion regarding these matters when key players are heavily invested in the institutions that funded the Wuhan labs. A general consensus on the lab origin theory would imply guilt on many, many participants, including multi-millionaire government functionaries such as Antony Fauci.
