The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier – The Atlantic
As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease.
The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses. Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
This is how The Atlantic situates itself so the lab leak hypothesis (or maybe we should now call it a “theory”) appears to sneak up on it. Then The Atlantic can turn around and say, Oh dear! Who would have guessed! But at least they have officially noticed it now and are talking about it. Small favors. The “consensus view”? — oh, please. It might still be that the nasty little bugger emerged naturally, in spite of all appearances, but if it did, it won’t be because of any of the phony baloney science that Dr. Daszak orchestrated.