3 Years After Covid Started, Why Don’t We Have Answers About The Likely Lab Leak?

Why don’t we know the origins of Covid-19? It’s been nearly three years, and even after scientists have analyzed millions of virus sequences, have taken samples of thousands of animals, including hundreds from the Wuhan market where the virus first is alleged to have broken out, we still haven’t discovered the proximal cause of the pandemic. It is strange, to say the least. 

In November of 2002, a SARS outbreak erupted among restaurant workers handling live animals in a  “wet market” located in Shenzhen, China. Not long after the initial outbreak, the disease went international. By May 2003, Chinese researchers found a virus in palm civet cats at the market that was nearly identical to the pandemic virus. This virus, SARS-CoV, fizzled out after causing 8,000 cases resulting in 800 deaths worldwide. But the virus currently in question is believed to have caused nearly 1 billion cases and possibly 20 million excess deaths, and we are still searching for answers. Why?

What if the proximal origin of the current pandemic is a U.S. government-funded, lab-engineered virus that leaked from the Wuhan laboratory? What if powerful interests would rather you not find out? It may sound conspiratorial, but we should consider the science.

The closest overall genetic match to SARS-CoV-2 is a bat coronavirus named RaTG13. But this virus is not a close enough genetic match to have morphed into SARS-CoV-2, especially given that RaTG13 cannot infect human cells. Curiously, the part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike that binds to human cells (i.e., the receptor-binding domain or RBD) is nearly identical to the RBD in a pangolin coronavirus spike. Stranger still is that a virus that supposedly just emerged from an animal was so optimized for human infection. 

Should we be alarmed that publication of this important information was suspiciously stifled for over one year, corresponding to when Anthony Fauci reluctantly admitted that a “lab leak” was possible? 

Another anomaly of the SARS-CoV-2 spike is the presence of the all-important “furin cleavage site” (FCS) that is missing in all known close relatives.

Due to similar designs, some hypothesized origins of the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 include a distantly related feline coronavirus or an important protein in human lungs called ENac-alpha. Feline coronaviruses have so little in common with SARS-CoV-2 that it’s a huge stretch to imagine natural recombination between these viruses occurring at all, especially given that only the tiny FCS fragment would have been acquired. With regard to ENac-alpha, it’s been suggested that an FCS found in the human lungs “might be a rational, if not obvious” choice for insertion into a hybrid virus.

There are published  “proof of concept” examples of this type of work in which an FCS from one virus was transplanted into another, resulting in demonstrable “gain of function.” Meanwhile, the “natural origin” position suggests that bat and pangolin coronaviruses naturally co-mingled, their hybrid progeny somehow picked up an FCS, possibly by co-mingling with a distantly related cat coronavirus, then the hybrid virus burst into the world from

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