Gravitas Plus: The Lab Leak Theory

it's the 5th of june 2021 522 days since this virus emerged and like a sucker punch knocked out all our lives it's been a horrid time we've been through a lot our lives have changed but one question one frustrating question has not changed where did it come from what's the source of the virus bats minks pangolins frozen meat a wet market a bio lab or is it just some sort of divine punishment we still don't know 18 months 3.7 million deaths and all we have are claims counter claims conjecture and theories one of them is gaining steam by the way the lab leak theory it was initially dismissed as nonsense we started reporting it from the 4th of february 2020 and since then we've broadcast more than 100 reports on this our reports were dismissed as conspiracy theories our interviews were labeled fake news we faced warnings bans and boycotts china blocked our broadcasts but we stood by our stories we stand by them because journalism is not just about stating what's obvious it's about reading between the lines joining the dots raising uncomfortable questions and putting facts over political convenience so we kept asking the question on the origin of the virus and a potential link to the lab and now all of a sudden everyone is talking about the lab theory why now do we have more evidence now were we distracted by the mess created by china or were we just waiting for donald trump to go it's important to ask these questions because if we are really victims of an unethical lab experiment or some sort of a bio war we must ask what took us so long to realize this hello and welcome to gravitas plus i'm palki sharma u.s president joe biden has a newfound interest in an old theory the same theory that his party once dismissed now they say a lab leak could be a possibility and the entire world is taking it seriously on the 14th of may a group of 18 american scientists published a letter in the journal science they said a new investigation is needed because the theories of an accidental lab release and a zoonotic spillover still remain viable then on may 26th joe biden tasked the us intelligence community to take things forward and trace the source was it an infected animal or a lab accident the white house statement said they did not have sufficient evidence to assess so what do we know about the lab theory we know there's a lab in china the wuhan institute of virology it's a high security biosafety lab run by the state-owned chinese academy of sciences this lab is the largest virus bank in asia it has at least 1500 strains of deadly viruses this is where it's located just five and a half kilometers away from the huanan seafood market which was identified as ground zero for the wuhan virus now this lab has a long history of shady experiments in 2005 it published a research on the origin of sars coronavirus the one that causes sars severe acute respiratory syndrome the paper said that china's horseshoe bats were natural reservoirs of this virus they began sampling these bats across china in 2012 the lab received samples from an abandoned mine deep in china's southwest yunnan province where miners shoveling bat feces had died of a mysterious pneumonia the fecal swabs were studied the virus discovered was named rat g13 in 2014 america entered the picture scientists from the university of north carolina collaborated with the wuhan institute of virology they were trying to artificially mutate this virus through gain of function research gain of function is basically a field of research where dangerous variants and versions of a virus are created what for to predict emerging infectious diseases and to figure out ways to tackle them so china and the us were doing this research together in 2014. america later suspended it but unofficially the u.s kept paying the lab how the same year 2014 america's national institute of allergy and infectious diseases headed by dr anthony fauci himself awarded a 3.4 million dollar grant this was to a new york-based health firm called eco health alliance this firm paid the wuhan lab 598 thousand five hundred dollars over five years to study bat corona viruses do you see the link was this american money used for gain of function research the republicans say it was they point at an april 2020 email from this health firm's president peter desarch to dr anthony fauci in this email he thanks fouchi for rejecting the lab league theory and for stating that scientific evidence supports a natural origin report sending money to the wuhan virology institute we do not send money now to do one hun if you think this is bizarre wait till you hear more in 2014 barack obama the 44th president of the united states warned that america must be ready because who knows if five years from now a new virus like the spanish flu pops up watch this there may and likely will come a time in which we have both an airborne disease that is deadly so that if and when a new strain of flu like the spanish flu crops up five years from now or a decade from now we've made the investment what will you call it coincidence farsightedness or did america have an inkling of what was cooking in china i'd leave it to your imagination and get back to the lab the year is 2018 the wuhan virology laboratory releases another paper saying villagers residing near yunnan's bat caves carried antibodies to the bat corona virus this indicates the possibility of transmission to humans then came 2019 in the month of november three employees at this lab fell sick at least this is what the u.s intelligence claims they say three workers sought hospital care with symptoms consistent with both covid19 and a common seasonal illness the very next month in december 2019 a novel coronavirus was detected in two patients at a wuhan hospital the samples were sent to dr xi zheng li china's bat woman the director of the wuhan virology lab dr xi's team found that the virus circulating in wuhan was a 96.2 match of the virus they had been studying at the lab and despite knowing all of this china did not take any proactive measures instead on the third of january when the cases grew into a cluster china's national health commission ordered all institutions to not publish any information about the sickness those who did were silenced like dr lee wen liang an ophthalmologist at the wuhan central hospital he sent out warnings on a closed wechat group informing his colleagues about the severity of this virus but he was censured by the hospital's authorities summoned by the public safety bureau in wuhan and forced to sign a statement of apology for spreading rumors and disrupting public order what followed was more disinformation more cover-ups and more disappearances a total of 5100 people were either arrested or labeled sick so that they could be placed and quarantined what about the rest of the world well some of us did ask questions right from day one beyond reported on how things just did not add up we called it the wuhan virus so that the world does not forget china's culpability but the world health organization said that we must not characterize or profile the virus because there is no blame in this and all evidence points to a natural origin exact word spoken around the same time the lancet said to be one of the most respected and influential medical journals published a statement that roundly rejected the lab leak hypothesis everyone else followed suit and this pretty much ended the scientific debate around it it took the world 18 months countless mutations 3.6 million deaths and 171 million plus cases to give the lab leak hypothesis a second look 18 months that's the kind of time that china was given to erase all evidence in july last year there were floods in wuhan most of the reports pointed at the floods being man-made chinese activists like jennifer zheng claimed that this move was undertaken intentionally so that china could purge all evidence this too was labeled as far fetched we need to come to terms with who we are dealing with china is a country that has been an incubator of new diseases for decades the asian flu in 1956 the h5n1 bird flu in 1997 the sars epidemic in 2002 and now the wuhan virus i'm not suggesting that these diseases were purposely spread but china is known to carry out research on making naturally occurring viruses deadlier to increase their transmissibility and virality do you know how many animal samples have been tested to see if they were the source 80 000 samples from 30 species they come from farm and wild animals in china how many of them have tested positive as a source zero yes the genetic sequence of this virus shows no evidence of manipulation so far but scientific journals also say that there are methods which allow scientists to modify viral sequences without leaving a trace and this includes cutting the genome into fragments that can later come together through natural recombination there are so many scenarios compatible with the lab leak theory that it leaves one wondering what have we been doing all this while we dismiss the lab scenario as a conspiracy of the ultra right we dismiss citizen journalists reporting on it as amateur sleuths and we dismiss those raising questions as xenophobic so let me say this china may have caused a pandemic it intended to prevent or it may have created a virus it intended to spread but it definitely has a role to play and we need to find out what that role was because there's no guarantee this pandemic will be the last

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Id: ih85CcF0yE0

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021