Origins of COVID: A Historic Senate Showdown

Dr. Robert Garry dogged in making himself look ridiculous; Drs. Stephen Quay and Richard Ebright set the record straight; Congress persists in blaming fictitious "lack of transparency" in China.

Yesterday I was invited to talk on an afternoon news show about the June 18, 2024 Senate Homeland Security Committee’s hearing on the ORIGINS OF COVID-19: AN EXAMINATION OF AVAILABLE EVIDENCE.

When I accepted the invitation, I figured the hearing’s expert witnesses would provide cover for the U.S. government’s lie that the true origin will never be determined because (of the lie that) its origin remains ambiguous, or because (of the lie that) the Chinese—to whom the U.S. government authorized the transfer American biotechnology—refuse to cooperate with the investigation.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to see that two of the witnesses—Professor Richard Ebright (PH.D. Rutgers University) and Stephen Quay (M.D., PH.D., former Faculty Stanford University School of Medicine) presented highly persuasive arguments that SARS-COV-2 was the creation of American scientists working with partners at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

As readers of this Substack are aware, we have known this for years, and have often marveled at just how long the U.S. government and mainstream media have been able to maintain the preposterous charade that we don’t know this.

Especially powerful was the testimony of Dr. Stephen Quay. Especially bizarre was the spectacle of Tulane University Professor Robert Garry persisting in making himself ridiculous.

Readers may recall that Professor Garry was part of the elite clique of virologists who privately corresponded with Anthony Fauci in February 2020 about their initial perceptions of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. As Professor Garry wrote in an February 2, 2020 E-mail to this cabal:

I really can’t think of a plausible, natural scenario where you can get from the bat virus, or one very similar to it, to this … I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. It’s stunning. Of course, in the lab, it would be easy.

In another private message, Professor Garry stated: “Someone should tell Nature [the British journal] that the fish market probably did not start the outbreak.”

Six weeks later—an interim in which zero evidence emerged to the contrary of this statement—Garry and his colleagues (on the Email thread) published “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in which they stated the exact opposite of the perceptions they initially shared in their private correspondence. In this paper—intended to be read by the media and public policymakers—they claimed the virus had emerged from nature. This fraudulent paper became the basis of the greatest lie ever propagated about a matter of scientific research—a matter affecting the lives of all of mankind.

After telling such a spectacular lie, Professor Garry apparently finds himself unable to retract it. And so, in his Senate testimony, he persisted in telling the fiction that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a bat and further evolved in an intermediate species of animal that must have been for sale at a Wuhan food market.

As Dr. Quay stated in a pointed way, there is ZERO evidence to support Professor Garry’s proposition, and a mountain of glaring evidence that SARS-CoV-2 came from the Wuhan lab—a lab that was known to be performing work on bat coronaviruses to make them infectious to humans.

Highlights from Ebright’s Testimony:

• COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, more than 800 miles from the closest bats harboring SARS-CoV-2 live viruses that could have served as progenitors.

• The now-debarred Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the global epicenter of research on bat SARS viruses, carried out US-funded, gain-of-function research on the viruses between 2014 and 2021.

• During this period, the WIV conducted the world’s largest research program on bat SARS viruses and had “the world’s largest collection of bat SARS viruses — including the virus most closely similar to SARS-CoV-2.

• The Wuhan lab obtained SARS viruses that had a high pandemic potential in the four years before COVID-19. Just one year earlier, WIV performed research that genetically modified the viruses that match in detail the features of SARS-CoV-2.

• By 2015, members of the Royal Society and US National Academy of Sciences had singled out the WIV experiments as the most likely of all research in the world to trigger a pandemic.

• This research was funded in part by a more than $4 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to the since-suspended Manhattan-based public health nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, about half a million dollars of which directly flowed to WIV.

• Another $815,000 was given to WIV through sub-grants that originated with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and passed through the University of California, Davis, and EcoHealth.

• EcoHealth lost its status as a federal grantee for likely violating biosafety standards with its WIV project, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” and failing to report the experiments, which resulted in a modified virus that was 10,000 times more infectious in lungs, 1 million times more infectious in brains and three times more lethal in humanized lab mice.

• The “smoking gun” evidence for a lab origin of COVID-19, came from a separate EcoHealth proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—which deemed it too dangerous—presenting the exact feature of a furin cleavage site in the virus.

• SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 800 known SARS viruses that possess a furin cleavage site.

Highlights from Quay’s Testimony

• First, the virus was spreading in Wuhan in the early fall of 2019, two to four months before the first case in the Hunan Seafood Market. This is supported by fourteen observations or evidence. This should be sufficient to dismiss the Hunan Market as the source of the outbreak.

• Second, I look at the data from the market, including human infections, animal samples, and environmental specimens. This involves looking at eight observations or evidence. None of these data are consistent with an infected animal passing SARS2 to a human at the market.

• Third, documented events at or related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, beginning in March 2019, are consistent with the expected activities of a virology lab in which a laboratory acquired infection has occurred. I will go through that timeline.

• Fourth, the evidence that is found in a natural zoonosis with respect to the animal host, the virus, and the human population in the vicinity of the outbreak is missing for the COVID pandemic. Each of these three components of a zoonosis will be examined separately and each will be found wanting.

• Fifth, the genome of SARS-CoV-2 has seven features that would be expected to be found in a virus constructed in a laboratory and which are not found in viruses from nature. The statistical probability of finding each feature in nature can be determined and the combined probability that SARS2 came from nature is less than one in 1.2 billion. These same features were described in a grant application submitted to DARPA in 2018 by scientists from the WIV, together with US collaborators.

• Sixth and final, the earliest genomes of SARS2 were unstable and could not have come from an animal host without the stabilizing mutation, the so-called D614G change, that appeared in human viruses beginning January 1st, 2020. The consequence of this is that I can conclude that the first human infection occurred soon after the insertion of the furin cleavage site in the laboratory and before extensive animal testing. Otherwise, the first human cases would have had this stabilizing mutation. It also means that the unstable version of SARS2 could not have been circulating in animals, otherwise it would have acquired the stabilizing mutation. If any virologist can find an animal host that can transmit the unstable ancestral SARS2 five or more times without obtaining the stabilizing mutation, they have found a hypothetical candidate for a spillover host. All testing to date of potential hosts has failed this test.

• Natural spillovers have multiple markets. SARS-CoV-1 , which emerged in China in 2002, and was found in at least 11 markets. 192 animals showed a 100% infection rate for SARS-CoV-1. This starkly contrasts with 457 animals that were tested for SARS-CoV-2, with zero found to be infected.

After reading the testimony of Drs. Ebright and Quay, I wondered which witness would give the U.S. government the cover it needs claim that final clarity will remain elusive because of China’s purported lack of transparency.

Given that Professor Garry has lost all credibility, I figured it had to be GREGORY KOBLENTZ, PH.D. Associate Professor and Director, Biodefense Graduate Program, George Mason University. I read the transcript of his remarks, and sure enough, there it was on page two:

It is my judgment that a natural spillover event is the most likely cause of the pandemic. However, a laboratory or research-related origin cannot be ruled out. The inability to rule out a lab-origin of the virus is disturbing and indicative of significant weaknesses in global bio-risk management as well as the lack of transparency by China.

The fiction offered by Dr. Koblentz’s had already been offered by Representative Brad Wenstrup in his media commentary of his House Committee’s recent examination of EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.

I suspect that everyone on the Hill understands that if the full truth of U.S. involvement in the creation of SARS-CoV-2 is acknowledged by the U.S. government, the liabilities will be incalculably astronomical.