I'm Keeping My Eye On The Wuhan Lab Leak Story

Over the past month, the story has gradually been emerging that the COVID virus almost certainly did not jump from bats to humans but instead was developed artificially in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which according to Wikipedia

is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which reports to the State Council of the People's Republic of China. Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory. The institute has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada.

Last week, a peer-reviewed paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery that made a number of "explosive" claims about the origin of the virus. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Much of the work was centered around controversial 'Gain of Function' research – temporarily outlawed in the US under the Obama administration.

Gain of Function involves tweaking naturally occurring viruses to make them more infectious, so that they can replicate in human cells in a lab, allowing the virus's potential effect on humans to be studied and better understood.

. . . 'A natural virus pandemic would be expected to mutate gradually and become more infectious but less pathogenic which is what many expected with the COVID-19 pandemic but which does not appear to have happened,' the scientists wrote.

'The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 makes it imperative to reconsider what types of Gain of Function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake.

'Because of wide social impact, these decisions cannot be left to research scientists alone.'

Last week, Biden ordered intelligence officials to "redouble" efforts to investigate the origins of COVID and report back to him in 90 days. Clearly he's shocked, shocked. Ric Grenell, who was acting Director of National Intelligence under Trump, said

''If you go back to April 30, 2020, there is a statement that was issued when I was acting director of national intelligence that the entire intelligence community agreed to, and that’s a very rare thing when you can get all of the agencies to sign off on every verb and every comma. But they did and they made three very critical points and, in that statement – it’s still up on the DNI website – we said China was responsible for COVID-19.

. . . 'Now we have Joe Biden pretending to instruct the intelligence community to go review documents and catch up. Let me be very clear, the intelligence community every day looks at documents. They don’t need to be told to catch up or do a 90-day review. They do that review every single day. So, if one person is behind and wants a 90-day catch-up, it’s Joe Biden.''

The question that's still murky here is why the "gain of function" research was being done. In the Daily Mail link above, there are clearly ethical queations notwithstanding any other factor. The CDC was funding work at the Wuhan lab via a subgrant. A big question is how well this grant was supervised, and money is fungible. If I give my teen an allowance on the condition it's not to buy drugs, but the kid also has a part-time job, he can buy drugs and claim the bills he used to buy them weren't from his allowance -- but notwithstanding, the allowance made him able to buy drugs as well as gas for his car. Thus Dr Fauci:

During the Senate hearing on 26 May, [Louisiana Republican Sen John] Kennedy asked Fauci, who serves as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whether the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) might have lied about conducting “gain-of-function” research.

. . . Kennedy retorted by asking how he would know if the WIV conducted research or not, to which Fauci said, “There is no way of guaranteeing that. But in our experience with grantees, including Chinese grantees…they are very competent scientists that you would expect would bide by the conditions of the grant, which they have done in the years that we have had interactions with them.”

Add to the questioins of ethics and effective supervision of the grant the additional very real possibility that the Wuhan research was conducted specifically to weaponize the virus. At that point Dr Fauci's position is simply untenable.

This is why Biden is happy to wait 90 days to hear back. But we've had a holiday break, and blood is in the water.