Lisa E Gralinski, a researcher in Ralph Baric's lab at UNC Chapel Hill, provided guidance and protocols for animal experiments at WIV involving SARS-like chimeras in 2017. Note: The thesis contains no animal experiments itself. But in Chapter 3, it explicitly identifies animal work as a proposed next step to test whether monoclonal antibodies can protect animals from infection by the strains. Another nice find by Francisco.

I told @mtaibbi: 'If you set aside the FOIA material and the Senate/Congressional releases, almost every load-bearing step in this story traces back to DRASTIC or people working alongside or adjacent to it.'

I didn’t know that these slides had been declassified and released. It gives a glimpse of what our top analysts thought from early on. And, with Senator Paul’s incredible work, everyone can see NIAID’s massive duplicity — a pattern that applied across the deep state, including at the State Department itself (not with my investigative team but people in our leadership who were part of the COVID coverup).

"Asking about a possible favor?" - Peter Daszak Is this a routine exchange for how NASEM membership work? Daszak's bid for NAS membership ultimately fell short, but he is still a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).

An Article in Science on Wet-Market Covid Origins is Unreliable by Michael B. Weissman An influential paper by Worobey et al. and 17 other authors published in Science in 2022 claimed that case locations and nucleic acid samples showed that SARS-CoV-2 had first been introduced to humans at the Huanan Seafood Market. Several lines of evidence suggest the introduction to humans was earlier and elsewhere.

Interesting piece from @statnews. For six years, they dismissed the lab theory because it implicated Fauci. Now they are saying the Wuhan lab may have been the source because it exonerates Fauci. Which is it, STAT?

Given the scientific significance of the Mojiang mine cases, I find it super odd that more than 13 years after RaTG13 was sampled there, the Wuhan lab still hasn't reported a single close relative from that lineage. There have been no reported expeditions back to the mine since COVID. And the one outside team that did manage to collect samples from the mine, had them confiscated.

A newly published scientific perspective on Covid origins by Jason Bannan, an FBI scientist who supported the 2021 intel assessment: "as we approach the seventh year of the COVID19 pandemic, more evidence has emerged that supports the research origin theory"

@CroakeyNews It's strange that you lump "engineered" in with "deliberately released". There's a lot of evidence that the virus was modified along the lines described in a grant proposal from the lab (and UNC) but the idea that it was deliberately released is crazy and has no evidence.

We still don't know. I previously thought a 50% chance for a lab leak compared to natural spillover. But now because of evidence slowly appearing, I think more likely closer ti an 80% probability that it was an accidental lab leak in Wuhan.

My view on COVID origins isn't new — I've held it since my time at the White House Here's the truth: no one in America knows for sure. Anyone telling you they do is selling you something Based on strong circumstantial evidence I've seen, I think lab leak is much more likely. Not engineered. Not deliberate. Accidental Reasonable people can look at the same evidence and disagree

Just over six years ago, I found something unusual in the data for the closest match to the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2. Soon after the pandemic began, the Wuhan Institute of Virology published RaTG13, having previously called it BtCoV/4991 in a short sequence published pre-pandemic. Strangely, 6/33 published reads of RaTG13 were labeled "7896", the name of a different betacoronavirus kept in the Wuhan lab. Why would the lab, known for splicing different viruses together, name part of one virus after another? Naturally, I wondered if RaTG13 was actually a composite virus of the original BtCoV/4991 and 7896. I shared the finding in the Drastic group chat and we investigated it, with @franciscodeasis then publicly alerting @Ayjchan to the dates in the amplicon sequences, who then mapped out the lab's work progress with RaTG13 before the pandemic. The Wuhan lab has since released a virus they claimed to be the original 7896. The parts of RaTG13 labeled 7896 are a close match to the published 7896 virus, but not quite it. So what did they publish? Another virus? Another composite? Splicing viruses together and then testing how well the composite viruses bind to human cells was exactly what the lab did (See this summary from 2021: But the 7896 parts of RaTG13 may not be from a different virus spliced together. If we take them at face value, the lab appears to have been using 7896 as part of the sequencing process, a sort of reference point to amplify and see what they were looking at in RaTG13. According to the lab, they started using new sequencing equipment in 2018 so would not have had to do that any more, but these were dated June 2017. The six RaTG13 7896 sequences cover the area around the RdRp and are labeled 1, 2 and 4. The area which would have been 3 is where the already published short BtCoV/4991 RdRp sequence should be, so it looks like they started with that then expanded coverage using parts of what they already had from 7896. This tells us about their pre-pandemic workstream. As some of the published RdRp sequences of the group of viruses including 7896 are identical, the Wuhan lab must have had longer sequences from them to be able to tell them apart. It tells us that the lab was working on some of the most similar viruses to the pandemic one as a group before the pandemic, using parts of their research into one to inform research into another. And why were they doing this work in the run up to the pandemic? The latest date in the RaTG13 amplicon sequences was only 11 weeks before a project testing human ACE2 receptor binding of two novel bat SARS-related coronaviruses was due to begin in January 2019. Was the work in preparation for that?