Rising fascism in the US

Of course it leaked from the place in Wuhan where they were weaponizing it.

The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It was established by scientists Gao Shangyin, a graduate of Soochow University (Suzhou),[7] and Chen Huagui.[8] In 1961, it became the South China Institute of Microbiology, and in 1962 was renamed Wuhan Microbiology Institute. In 1970, it became the Microbiology Institute of Hubei Province when the Hubei Commission of Science and Technology took over the administration. In June 1978, it was returned to the CAS and renamed Wuhan Institute of Virology.[9]

In 2003, the Chinese academy of Sciences approved the construction of mainland China's first[a] biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory at the WIV. In 2014, the WIV's National Bio-safety Laboratory was built at a cost of 300 million yuan (US$44 million), in collaboration and with assistance from the French government's CIRI lab).[10][5][11] The new laboratory building has 3000 m2 of BSL-4 space, and also 20 BSL-2 and two BSL-3 laboratories.[12] The BSL-4 facilities were accredited by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS) in January 2017,[5] with the BSL-4 level lab put into operation in January 2018.[13] The highest level biosafety installation is necessary because the Institute investigated highly dangerous viruses, such as SARS, influenza H5N1, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue.[14]

The National Bio-safety Laboratory has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas.[15] It also had ties with Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory until WIV staff scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng, who were also remunerated by the Canadian government, were escorted from the Canadian lab for undisclosed reasons in July 2019.[16] Researchers from the WIV have, in the past, collaborated with international scientists in the creation of chimeric coronavirus.[17] Some researchers (notably Richard Ebright) believe this work falls under the definition of gain of function research, but many other experts dispute this classification.[18]

A number of safety precautions were taken into consideration when building the Wuhan lab. The lab was built far away from any flood plain. It was also built to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake, even though the region has no history of earthquakes. Many Wuhan lab staff were trained at a BSL-4 lab in Lyon, France.[5] Researchers were also trained in Australia, Canada, the United States and then in-house before the lab was operational.[12] Scientists such as U.S. molecular biologist Richard H. Ebright, who had expressed concern of previous escapes of the SARS virus at Chinese laboratories in Beijing and had been troubled by the pace and scale of China's plans for expansion into BSL-4 laboratories,[5] called the institute a "world-class research institution that does world-class research in virology and immunology" while he noted that the WIV is a world leader in the study of bat coronaviruses.[15]

The charge that they are "weaponizing" the virus is stupid, simplistic, and vaguely racist.

In virology, gain-of-function research is usually employed with the intention of better understanding current and future pandemics. In vaccine development, gain-of-function research is conducted in the hope of gaining a head start on a virus and being able to develop a vaccine or therapeutic before it emerges. The term "gain of function" is sometimes applied more narrowly to refer to "research which could enable a pandemic-potential pathogen to replicate more quickly or cause more harm in humans or other closely-related mammals."

Wikipedia wrote:

In virology, gain-of-function research is usually employed with the intention of better understanding current and future pandemics. In vaccine development, gain-of-function research is conducted in the hope of gaining a head start on a virus and being able to develop a vaccine or therapeutic before it emerges. The term "gain of function" is sometimes applied more narrowly to refer to "research which could enable a pandemic-potential pathogen to replicate more quickly or cause more harm in humans or other closely-related mammals."

Surely there is clear evidence in his book "The Truth About Wuhan" that proves the emergence and outbreak from the laboratory?

RE: Publication of Andrew Huff’s The Truth About Wuhan

December 5, 2022

Andrew Huff, a former employee of the EcoHealth Alliance, has published a book entitled The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History. According to press reports, Mr Huff claims that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a lab leak from research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance.

Mr. Huff is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts. The actual “truth about Wuhan” is:

1) Mr. Huff was employed by the EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016. However, reports that he worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology during that time are untrue. He was assigned to a completely different project working on computer-based algorithms to assess emerging disease threats.

2) Mr. Huff alleges that EcoHealth Alliance was engaged in gain of function research to create SARS-CoV-2. This is not true.

3) Mr. Huff makes a number of other speculations and allegations about the nature of the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Given that he never worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, his assertions along these lines cannot be trusted.

4) Mr. Huff claims that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology based on research conducted there on bat coronaviruses and, further, that this research was related to U.S. intelligence gathering efforts. This is not true.

Dr. Francis Collins, then Director of the U. S. National Institutes of Health issued the following statement on October 20, 2021: “NIH wants to set the record straight on NIH-supported research to understand naturally occurring bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded through a subaward from NIH grantee EcoHealth Alliance. Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.

The scientific evidence to date indicates that the virus is likely the result of viral evolution in nature, potentially jumping directly to humans or through an unidentified intermediary animal host. Historically, many viruses have emerged from animals to cause epidemics and pandemics, including influenza, Ebola, Zika, West Nile fever, SARS, and more. Importantly, after an intensive investigation, agencies in the U.S Intelligence Community agreed that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon and most agencies assessed that SARS-CoV-2 most likely was not genetically engineered.”
https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/statement-misinformation-about-sars-cov-2-origins

5) Mr. Huff argues that the origin of COVID-19 is definitely due to a lab leak, yet he provides no scientific evidence to support his case. To the contrary, the emerging consensus, based on peer-reviewed scientific evidence, is that COVID-19 originated through zoonotic spillover. Substantial published scientific evidence indicates that COVID-19 originated via a similar pathway to SARS, involving a spillover from bats to intermediate animal hosts, then to people within the wildlife trade, leading to the first known cluster in the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The hypothesis that SARS-COV-2 was created in a laboratory is now widely considered less probable than emergence via the wildlife trade. A recent report by the Independent Task Force on COVID-19 and Other Pandemic Origins, Prevention, and Response, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reviews the considerable peer-reviewed literature and concludes that the preponderance of the evidence is most consistent with COVID-19’s origin as a zoonotic infection within the wildlife trade. While a lab leak cannot be absolutely ruled out, the Independent Task Force found no verifiable and credible evidence or scientific data to support this interpretation.

Here is the link to the PNAS paper and its supplement (see Table S6) containing links to all of the available published (and some unpublished) evidence on COVID-19 origins: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202871119 .

Lash has Newsmax and the Washington Times to back up her, um, opinions. And these are two news sources long loved and respected by progressive scholars around the world.

...developing a bioweapon that wrecked the world...

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