Category: Free Speech

Shi Modified Bat Coronaviruses in Low Biosafety Wuhan Labs

(p. A1) Shi Zhengli, a top Chinese virologist, is once again at the center of clashing narratives about her research on coronaviruses at a state lab in Wuhan, the city where the pandemic first emerged.

The idea that the virus may have escaped from a lab had long been widely dismissed by scientists as implausible and shunned by others for its connection with former President Donald J. Trump. But fresh scrutiny from the Biden administration and calls for greater candor from prominent scientists have brought the theory back to the fore.

. . .

(p. A8) The Wuhan Institute of Virology employs nearly 300 people and is home to one of only two Chinese labs that have been given the highest security designation, Biosafety Level 4. Dr. Shi leads the institute’s work on emerging infectious diseases, and over the years, her group has collected over 10,000 bat samples from around China.

Under China’s centralized approach to scientific research, the institute answers to the Communist Party, which wants scientists to serve national goals. “Science has no borders, but scientists have a motherland,” Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, said in a speech to scientists last year.

Dr. Shi herself, though, does not belong to the Communist Party, according to official Chinese media reports, which is unusual for state employees of her status.

. . .

. . . some of her most notable findings have since drawn the heaviest scrutiny. In recent years, Dr. Shi began experimenting on bat coronaviruses by genetically modifying them to see how they behave.

In 2017, she and her colleagues at the Wuhan lab published a paper about an experiment in which they created new hybrid bat coronaviruses by mixing and matching parts of several existing ones — including at least one that was nearly transmissible to humans — in order to study their ability to infect and replicate in human cells.

Proponents of this type of research say it helps society prepare for future outbreaks. Critics say the risks of creating dangerous new pathogens may outweigh potential benefits.

The picture has been complicated by new questions about whether American government funding that went to Dr. Shi’s work supported controversial gain-of-function research. The Wuhan institute received around $600,000 in grant money from the United States government, through an American nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. The National Institutes of Health said it had not approved funding for the nonprofit to conduct gain-of-function research on coronaviruses that would have made them more infectious or lethal.

Dr. Shi, in an emailed response to questions, argued that her experiments differed from gain-of-function work because she did not set out to make a virus more dangerous, but to understand how it might jump across species.

“My lab has never conducted or cooperated in conducting GOF experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses,” she said.

. . .

Concerns have centered not only on what experiments Dr. Shi conducted, but also on the conditions under which she did them.

Some of Dr. Shi’s experiments on bat viruses were done in Biosafety Level 2 labs, where security is lower than in other labs at the institute. That has raised questions about whether a dangerous pathogen could have slipped out.

Ralph Baric, a prominent University of North Carolina expert in coronaviruses who signed the open letter in Science, said that although a natural origin of the virus was likely, he supported a review of what level of biosafety precautions were taken in studying bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan institute. Dr. Baric conducted N.I.H.-approved gain-of-function research at his lab at the University of North Carolina using information on viral genetic sequences provided by Dr. Shi.

Dr. Shi said that bat viruses in China could be studied in BSL-2 labs because there was no evidence that they directly infected humans, a view supported by some other scientists.

For the full story, see:

Amy Qin and Chris Buckley. “Chinese Scientist Under Pressure As Lab-Leak Theory Flourishes.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 15, 2021): A1 & A8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 14, 2021, and has the title “A Top Virologist in China, at Center of a Pandemic Storm, Speaks Out.”)

David Ellison Took Flak for Hiring Cancelled Animation Innovator

(p. 1) Mr. Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle, sure looked like “dumb money.” That is the Hollywood term for a gullible, affluent outsider bitten by the movie bug, the type of investor that studios have long counted on to keep their assembly lines running, despite it almost always ending poorly (for the newcomer). The young Mr. Ellison couldn’t stop talking about his love of cinema, in particular big-budget spectacles. He had just dropped out of the University of Southern California to act in a $60 million movie called “Flyboys,” a World War I aerial combat tale.

Partly financed with Ellison money, “Flyboys” arrived to a disastrous $6 million in ticket sales. But no matter: The scion was on Hollywood’s radar.

Along with his wallet.

Soon enough Mr. Ellison had given up acting and by 2010 had become a financier and producer for Paramount Pictures, pouring $350 million of equity and debt into movies like “Star Trek Into Darkness” and “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.” But Hollywood snickered at his effort to be taken seriously as a creative force, as did the news media.

. . .

(p. 10) Mr. Ellison . . . enraged half of Hollywood by abruptly announcing in January 2019 that John Lasseter, co-founder of Pixar, would join Skydance as animation chief. Mr. Lasseter (“Toy Story,” “Cars”) was radioactive at the time, having resigned seven months earlier as Disney’s chief creative officer amid #MeToo complaints about unwanted workplace hugging and imperious behavior. (Mr. Lasseter had apologized for “missteps” that made some Disney-Pixar staff members feel “disrespected or uncomfortable.”)

People like Mr. Ellison typically sulk off to some luxury hideaway at this point in the script to nurse their wounds. (Lanai, the Hawaiian island owned by his father, would do nicely.) Accustomed to floating through life, they seem unable to cope with anything less, especially if it means admitting missteps.

Instead, Mr. Ellison served up a major plot twist.

He raised $275 million by selling 10 percent of Skydance to investors like RedBird Capital, a private investment firm, and CJ Entertainment, the Korean company behind the Oscar-winning “Parasite.” He lined up $1 billion in revolving credit through JPMorgan Chase. And Skydance made a sharp turn toward streaming, selling attention-getting content to whichever service wanted to pay the most.

So far, the result has been nothing short of remarkable, in part because Mr. Ellison’s timing was fortuitous. The pandemic supercharged home entertainment.

For the full story, see:

Brooks Barnes. “Not Such ‘Dumb Money’ After All.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, June 20, 2021): 1 & 10-11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 16, 2021, and has the title “Dumb Money No More: How David Ellison Became a Hollywood High Flier.”)

Entrepreneur Pan Leaves Communist China After Xi Arrests Human Rights Defender and Friend

(p. B1) China’s economy is on a tear. Factories are humming, and foreign investment is flowing in. Even so, the wealthy and powerful people atop some of the country’s most prominent companies are heading for the exits.

The latest are Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, the husband-and-wife team that runs Soho China, a property developer known for its blobby, futuristic office buildings. In striking a deal this week to sell a controlling stake to the investment giant Blackstone for as much as $3 billion, Mr. Pan and Ms. Zhang are turning over the company as high-profile entrepreneurs come under public and official scrutiny in China like never before.

. . .

(p. B5) “For big tycoons in China, nowadays they need to be careful in general,” said Ling Chen, who studies state-business relations in China at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

. . .

Mr. Pan was . . . one of the first Chinese business leaders to recognize the power of the internet in marketing and public relations. He wrote a popular blog in the 2000s. Then, when the Twitter-like social media platform Weibo came along, he quickly became one of its most influential voices, amassing more than 20 million followers.

. . .

He was never too pointed in expressing his opinions. But he wanted China to learn from its mistakes, such as its cruel treatment of the moneyed and educated classes during the Cultural Revolution.

After Mr. Xi took office as China’s top leader in 2013, the authorities began going after businesspeople and intellectuals with big online followings. The police that year arrested Wang Gongquan, a friend of Mr. Pan’s and supporter of human rights causes, on charges of disrupting public order.

Mr. Pan and Ms. Zhang began selling off property holdings in China and spending more time in the United States.

For the full story, see:

Raymond Zhong. “A Chinese Power Couple Cashes Out.” The New York Times (Friday, June 18, 2021): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 17, 2021, and has the title “As China Scrutinizes Its Entrepreneurs, a Power Couple Cashes Out.”)

To Extort U.S. Firms, Xi Passes Laws that Firms Cannot Obey

(p. B1) Doug Guthrie spent 1994 riding a single-speed bicycle between factories in Shanghai for a dissertation on Chinese industry. Within years, he was one of America’s leading experts on China’s turn toward capitalism and was helping companies venture East.

Two decades later, in 2014, Apple hired him to help navigate perhaps its most important market. By then, he was worried about China’s new direction.

China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, was leaning on Western companies to strengthen his grip on the country. Mr. Guthrie realized that few companies were bigger targets, or more vulnerable, than Apple. It assembled nearly every Apple device in China and had made the region its No. 2 sales market.

So Mr. Guthrie began touring the company with a slide show and lecture to ring the alarm. Apple, he said, had no Plan B.

“I was going around to business leaders, and I’m like: ‘Do you guys understand who Xi Jinping is? Are you listening to what’s going on here?’” Mr. Guthrie said in an interview. “That was my big calling card.”

His warnings were prescient. China has taken a nationalist, au-(p. B3)thoritarian turn under Mr. Xi, and American companies like Apple, Nike and the National Basketball Association are facing a dilemma. While doing business in China often remains lucrative, it also increasingly requires uncomfortable compromises.

That trend raises the question of whether, instead of empowering the Chinese people, American investment in the country has empowered the Chinese Communist Party.

. . .

Mr. Guthrie’s career arc and evolving view of China tell the story of Western industry’s complicated dance with the country over the past three decades. Mr. Guthrie and many executives, politicians and academics had bet that Western investment in China would lead the country to liberalize. It is now clear that they miscalculated.

“We were wrong,” said Mr. Guthrie, who left Apple in 2019. “The wild card was Xi Jinping.”

In recent years, China shut down Marriott’s website after it listed Tibet and Taiwan as separate countries in a customer survey. It suspended sign-ups to LinkedIn after the site failed to censor enough political content. And the Communist Party urged a boycott of Western apparel companies that criticized forced-labor practices in Xinjiang, a Chinese region where the government is repressing Uyghurs, the country’s Muslim ethnic minority.

. . .

In 2014, China’s so-called dispatch labor law went into effect, limiting the share of temporary workers in a company’s work force to 10 percent. From Day 1, Apple and its suppliers were in violation.

At a Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, China, the world’s biggest iPhone factory, temporary workers made up as much as half of the work force, according to a report by China Labor Watch, an advocacy group. After the report, Apple confirmed that the factory broke the law.

Apple executives were concerned and confused, Mr. Guthrie said. They knew the company couldn’t comply because it needed the extra workers to meet periods of intense demand, such as the holidays.

. . .

“‘This is the point. You are supposed to be out of compliance,’” he said he had told them. “‘Not so they can shut you down, but so you’ll figure out what they want you to do and figure out how to do it.’”

Mr. Guthrie, who is often tucking his long, graying hair behind his ears, began giving his lecture on Apple’s risk in China around that time. Its extreme reliance on the country left it with little leverage to resist.

Apple continued to grapple with demands from the government.

. . .

To measure the success of their lobbying, Apple executives looked to the government’s annual corporate social responsibility scores, a proxy for the Communist Party’s view of a company.

. . .

Apple’s score steadily improved. From 2016 to 2020, its ranking among all companies in China rose from No. 141 to No. 30.

Apple didn’t always successfully resist the government’s demands. Over that period, Mr. Cook had agreed to store his Chinese customers’ private data — and the digital keys to unlock that data — on computer servers owned and run by the Chinese government.

For the full story, see:

Jack Nicas. “A Warning On China Is Prescient For Apple.” The New York Times (Friday, June 18, 2021): B1 & B3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 17, 2021, and has the title “He Warned Apple About the Risks in China. Then They Became Reality.”)

Media Used “Censorship and Vilification” to Suppress Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory

(p. A23) If it turns out that the Covid pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, it will rank among the greatest scientific scandals in history: dangerous research, possibly involving ethically dubious techniques that make viruses more dangerous, carried out in a poorly safeguarded facility, thuggishly covered up by a regime more interested in propaganda than human life, catastrophic for the entire world.

But this possible scandal, which is as yet unproved, obscures an actual scandal, which remains to be digested.

I mean the long refusal by too many media gatekeepers (social as well as mainstream) to take the lab-leak theory seriously. The reasons for this — rank partisanship and credulous reporting — and the methods by which it was enforced — censorship and vilification — are reminders that sometimes the most destructive enemies of science can be those who claim to speak in its name.

. . .

Was it smart for science reporters to accept the authority of a February 2020 letter, signed by 27 scientists and published in The Lancet, feverishly insisting on the “natural origin” of Covid? Not if those reporters had probed the ties between the letter’s lead author and the Wuhan lab (a fact, as the science writer Nicholas Wade points out in a landmark essay in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that has been public knowledge for months).

Was it wise to suppose that the World Health Organization, which has served as a mouthpiece for Chinese regime propaganda, should be an authority on what counted as Covid “misinformation” by Facebook, which in February [2021] banned the lab-leak theory from its platform? Not if the aim of companies like Facebook is to bring the world closer together, as opposed to laundering Chinese government disinformation while modeling its illiberal methods.

. . .

Yet the lab-leak theory, whether or not it turns out to be right, was always credible. Even if Tom Cotton believed it. Even if the scientific “consensus” disputed it. Even if bigots — who rarely need a pretext — drew bigoted conclusions from it.

Good journalism, like good science, should follow evidence, not narratives. It should pay as much heed to intelligent gadflies as it does to eminent authorities. And it should never treat honest disagreement as moral heresy.

Anyone wondering why so many people have become so hostile to the pronouncements of public-health officials and science journalists should draw the appropriate conclusion from this story. When lecturing the public about the dangers of misinformation, it’s best not to peddle it yourself.

For the full commentary, see:

Bret Stephens. “The Lab-Leak Theory and The Media.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 1, 2021): A23.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added; italics in original.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 31, 2021, and has the title “Media Groupthink and the Lab-Leak Theory.”)

“We Demand the Right to Have Rights”

(p. A9) An alliance of hip-hop musicians, writers, internationally known artists and Black activists has emerged as a driving force against censorship and government repression in Cuba, prompting a rare Communist government action: to hold talks about freedom of expression.

Hundreds of Cubans, many of them young artists from elite schools, protested in front of the country’s stately neoclassical Ministry of Culture in Havana’s upscale Vedado district, overnight on Friday. Protests of any sort are very rare in Cuba.

“We demand the right to have rights…. The right of free expression, of free creation, the right to dissent,” said Katherine Bisquet, a young poet, reading the activists’ manifesto by the light of cellphones outside of the ministry where streetlights were turned off. Videos posted on social media showed Ms. Bisquet saying that she spoke for all Cuban citizens.

. . .

Jake Sullivan, President-elect Joe Biden’s national security adviser-designate, in a tweet Sunday said that Mr. Biden supported the Cuban people in their struggle for liberty, called for the government to release peaceful protesters and said Cubans must be allowed to exercise “the universal right to freedom of expression.”

For the full story, see:

José de Córdoba and Santiago Pérez. “Cuba’s Creative Class Crafts United Protest Against Censorship.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, December 1, 2020): A9.

(Note: ellipsis internal to third quoted paragraph, in original; ellipsis between paragraphs, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 30, 2020, and has the title “Cuban Leadership Confronts a Rare Dissident Movement.” Where the wording in the last quoted paragraph is slightly different between the online and print versions, the passage quoted above follows the online version.)

Li Wenliang Was Not an Outlier: Chinese Communists Punished at Least 587 for Speaking Out on Covid-19

(p. A6) At least seven people over the past week have been threatened, detained or arrested after casting doubt over the government’s account of the deaths of Chinese soldiers during a clash last year with Indian troops. Three of them are being detained for between seven and 15 days. The other four face criminal charges, including one man who lives outside China.

“The internet is not a lawless place,” said the police notices issued in their cases. “Blasphemies of heroes and martyrs will not be tolerated.”

Their punishment might have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for an online database of speech crimes in China. A simple Google spreadsheet open for all to see, it lists nearly 2,000 times when the government punished people for what they said online and offline.

The list — which links directly to publicly issued verdicts, police notices and official news reports over the past eight years — is far from complete. Most punishment takes place behind closed doors.

Still, the list paints a bleak picture of a government that punishes its citizens for the slightest hint of criticism. It shows how random and merciless China’s legal system can be when it punishes its citizens for what they say, even though freedom of speech is written into China’s Constitution.

. . .

(p. B3) Perhaps the most depressing items are those about people who were punished for what they said about the Covid-19 pandemic. On top of the list is Dr. Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded on Jan. 1, 2020, along with seven others for trying to warn the country about the coronavirus. He died of the virus in early February last year and is now remembered as the whistle-blower who tried to warn the world about the outbreak. But the spreadsheet lists 587 other cases.

For the full story, see:

Li Yuan. “Spreadsheet on Censorship Shows China’s Human Toll.” The New York Times (Saturday, February 27, 2021): B1 & B3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 26, 2021, and has the title “China Persecutes Those Who Question ‘Heroes.’ A Sleuth Keeps Track.”)

Illuminators Were in MORE Demand AFTER the Arrival of the Printing Press

(p. C9) In “The Bookseller of Florence,” Ross King relates the fascinating story of a bookstore run by Vespasiano da Bisticci, a Florentine born in 1422, whose shop on the Via dei Librai, or Street of Booksellers, sat at the center of Florence’s golden age and its valiant recovery of ancient knowledge.

. . .

Before long, Vespasiano established a bookshop selling beautifully made manuscripts of newly fashionable Roman classics for prosperous clients. He was well placed: Florence, “the new Athens on the Arno,” was a city where an astounding seven of 10 citizens could read.

. . .

Vespasiano’s life straddled two eras. Before the dawn of movable type in Europe, readers relied on manuscripts, painstakingly copied by hand with goosequills on parchment made from animal skins. After, they flocked to buy cheaper books printed on presses. Meanwhile, scribes either became early adopters—trading their inkpots for composing sticks—or found themselves surprisingly busy rubricating and illuminating innumerable books rolling off the new presses. By the time the presses made their way south of the Alps, Vespasiano was in his early 30s and, for whatever reason, chose not to embrace the new technology.

Printing came to Florence later than elsewhere, possibly due in part to Vespasiano, who continued to sell only books copied out on parchment. Still, competition from printed books began to tell on his sales. Then, just when it seemed he might be edged out of the market, there arrived a redeeming commission by the count of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, for “the finest library since antiquity,” one that would keep Vespasiano’s team of dozens of scribes and illuminators busy for nearly a decade, well into the era of the printing press. Montefeltro, a wealthy mercenary—who at the age of 15 had seized a fortress long believed impregnable—was also a bookish man, like many in the Renaissance. He retained five men to read to him as he ate, and even a poet to sing his praises. Among the many books created for his library was Vespasiano’s masterpiece, the Urbino Bible, one of the most lavish illustrated books of all time.

For the full review, see:

Ernest Hilbert. “Wise Men Fished There.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 24, 2021): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 15, 2021, and has the title “‘The Bookseller of Florence’ Review: Manuscripts and Medicis.”)

The book under review is:

King, Ross. The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021.

Virologist “Dismayed” That Wuhan Lab Conducted Two Coronavirus Studies “With Only a Modest Level of Safety Measures”

(p. A6) On the heels of President Biden’s abrupt order to U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, many scientists reacted positively, reflecting their push in recent weeks for more information about the work of a virus lab in Wuhan, China. But they cautioned against expecting an answer in the three-month time frame of the president’s request.

After long steering clear of the debate, some influential scientists have lately become more open to expressing uncertainties about the origins of the virus. If the two most vocal poles of the argument are natural spillover vs. laboratory leak, these new voices have added a third point of view: a resounding undecided.

“In the beginning, there was a lot of pressure against speaking up, because it was tied to conspiracies and Trump supporters,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. “There was very little rational discussion going on in the beginning.”

. . .

While researchers generally welcome a sustained search for answers, some warn that those answers may not arrive any time soon — if ever.

“At the end of this process, I would not be surprised if we did not know much more than we know now,” said W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University who was one of the first U.S. scientists to visit China in early 2020 and consult with public health authorities there.

China’s lack of cooperation with the W.H.O. has long fueled suspicions about how the coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, had emerged seemingly from nowhere to seize the world.

. . .

Speaking recently to the former New York Times journalist Donald McNeil Jr., Dr. Lipkin said he was dismayed to learn of two coronavirus studies from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that had been carried out with only a modest level of safety measures, known as BSL-2.

In an interview with The Times, Dr. Lipkin said this fact wasn’t proof in itself that SARS-CoV-2 spread from the lab. “But it certainly does raise the possibility that must be considered,” he said.

A BSL-2 level of research would also add to the difficulty researchers will face trying to pin down clear evidence that a coronavirus infected the staff. At higher levels of security, staff regularly give blood samples that can be studied later for genetic material from viruses and antibodies against them. There may be no such record for SARS-CoV-2.

For the full story, see:

Carl Zimmer, James Gorman, and Benjamin Mueller. “Scientists Welcome a Search That Might Never Bear Fruit.” The New York Times (Friday, May 28, 2021): A6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 27, 2021, and has the title “Scientists Don’t Want to Ignore the ‘Lab Leak’ Theory, Despite No New Evidence.”)

Biden’s “Abrupt Shift” on Wuhan Lab Origin of Covid-19

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — President Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies on Wednesday to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, indicating that his administration takes seriously the possibility that the deadly virus was accidentally leaked from a lab, in addition to the prevailing theory that it was transmitted by an animal to humans outside a lab.

. . .

But the president’s carefully worded directive underscored a new surge in interest about the lab, which President Donald J. Trump and some of his top aides repeatedly blamed for the pandemic. Some scientists attributed the renewed focus on the lab to Mr. Trump’s departure from the White House — and being less identified with the theory — while others said it reflected the deep frustrations with the recent W.H.O. report that was co-written by Chinese scientists.

. . .

(p. A8) “For over a year, anyone asking questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been branded as a conspiracy theorist,” Mr. Hawley said. “The world needs to know if this pandemic was the product of negligence at the Wuhan lab, but the C.C.P. has done everything it can to block a credible investigation.”

In the past several days, the White House had played down the need for an investigation led by the United States and insisted that the W.H.O. was the proper place for an international inquiry. Mr. Biden’s statement on Wednesday was an abrupt shift.

. . .

Scientists had been reluctant to discuss the lab leak hypothesis last year because they had been on guard against disinformation, said Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiologist.

“Nobody wants to succumb to conspiracy theories,” he said.

But the March report by the group of W.H.O.-chosen experts in collaboration with Chinese scientists, dismissing the possibility of a lab leak as “extremely unlikely,” compelled some scientists to speak out.

“When I read that, I was very frustrated,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. Along with Professor Lipsitch, she signed a letter published in the journal Science this month saying that there was not enough evidence to decide whether a natural origin or an accidental laboratory leak caused the coronavirus pandemic.

“I think it’s really an unanswered question that really needs more rigorous investigation,” Dr. Iwasaki added.

From the earliest weeks of the outbreak, the Chinese government has worked to delay, deflect or block independent investigation of the virus’s origins.

Chinese officials said in early 2020 that the outbreak began at a Wuhan market, and they blamed illegal wildlife sales there. They did so despite having evidence that undermined that theory: Early data showed that four of the first five coronavirus patients had no clear links to the market. The government resisted accepting an international scientific mission.

For the full story, see:

Michael D. Shear, Julian E. Barnes, Carl Zimmer, and Benjamin Mueller. “President Orders Report in 90 Days on Virus Origins.” The New York Times (Thursday, May 27, 2021): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated May 27, 2021, and has the title “Biden Orders Intelligence Inquiry Into Origins of Virus.” Where the wording in the online and print versions of the passages quoted above differs, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Mainstream Elevates Wuhan Lab COVID-19 Origin That They “Once Dismissed as a Conspiracy Theory”

(p. A1) DANAOSHAN, China—On the outskirts of a village deep in the mountains of southwest China, a lone surveillance camera peers down toward a disused copper mine smothered in dense bamboo. As night approaches, bats swoop overhead.

This is the subterranean home of the closest known virus on Earth to the one that causes Covid-19. It is also now a touchpoint for escalating calls for a more thorough probe into whether the pandemic could have stemmed from a Chinese laboratory.

In April 2012, six miners here fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mine to clear bat guano. Three of them died.

Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were called in to investigate and, after taking samples from bats in the mine, identified several new coronaviruses.

Now, unanswered questions about the miners’ illness, the viruses found at the site and the research done with them have elevated (p. A12) into the mainstream an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory: that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the city where the first cases were found in December 2019. Continue reading “Mainstream Elevates Wuhan Lab COVID-19 Origin That They “Once Dismissed as a Conspiracy Theory””