Back in June 2021, The Last And Only Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Spoke Out

[Procrustes Stretched]

I wonder how this escaped most people. Then again, when enough shit hits the wall, who knows what sticks and what doesn't. It becomes difficult to separate things, let alone maintain reasoning, logic, understanding, a clear head..

But I like to stick with real scientists with expertise in a given field. And this one was there -- on the spot -- at the lab.

An Australian scientist who was the only foreigner at the Wuhan virus lab says she never got COVID-19 and doesn't believe the center leaked it

Bill Bostock
Jun 28, 2021

An Australian scientist who was the only foreigner at the Wuhan virus lab says she never got COVID-19 and doesn't believe the center leaked it

Danielle Anderson, 42, worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology's BSL-4 lab until November 2019. She told Bloomberg News she saw no sign of illness.

www.businessinsider.com

The Last And Only Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out - Virologist Danielle Anderson paints a very different picture of the Wuhan Institute.

By Michelle Fay Cortez
June 27, 2021

‘I’m Not Naive’

It’s not that it’s impossible the virus spilled from there. Anderson, better than most people, understands how a pathogen can escape from a laboratory. SARS, an earlier coronavirus that emerged in Asia in 2002 and killed more than 700 people, subsequently made its way out of secure facilities a handful of times, she said.

If presented with evidence that such an accident spawned Covid-19, Anderson “could foresee how things could maybe happen,” she said. “I’m not naive enough to say I absolutely write this off.”

And yet, she still believes it most likely came from a natural source. Since it took researchers almost a decade to pin down where in nature the SARS pathogen emerged, Anderson says she’s not surprised they haven’t found the “smoking gun” bat responsible for the latest outbreak yet.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is large enough that Anderson said she didn’t know what everyone was working on at the end of 2019. She is aware of published research from the lab that involved testing viral components for their propensity to infect human cells. Anderson is convinced no virus was made intentionally to infect people and deliberately released—one of the more disturbing theories to have emerged about the pandemic’s origins.

 

[Manonthestreet]

Bs

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Bs

What is bs? She was there.

 

[Manonthestreet]

Yeah so....doesn't mean she's honest

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Yeah so....doesn't mean she's honest

Shi Zhengli in the BSL-4 lab at the Wuhan Institute in 2017.Source: Feature China/Barcroft Media/Getty Images


Gain of Function

Anderson did concede that it would be theoretically possible for a scientist in the lab to be working on a gain of function technique to unknowingly infect themselves and to then unintentionally infect others in the community. But there’s no evidence that occurred and Anderson rated its likelihood as exceedingly slim.

Getting authorization to create a virus in this way typically requires many layers of approval, and there are scientific best practices that put strict limits on this kind of work. For example, a moratorium was placed on research that could be done on the 1918 Spanish Flu virus after scientists isolated it decades later.

Even if such a gain of function effort got clearance, it’s hard to achieve, Anderson said. The technique is called reverse genetics.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to actually make it work when you want it to work,” she said.

Anderson’s lab in Singapore was one of the first to isolate SARS-CoV-2 from a Covid patient outside China and then to grow the virus. It was complicated and challenging, even for a team used to working with coronaviruses that knew its biological characteristics, including which protein receptor it targets. These key facets wouldn’t be known by anyone trying to craft a new virus, she said. Even then, the material that researchers study—the virus’s basic building blocks and genetic fingerprint—aren’t initially infectious, so they would need to culture significant amounts to infect people.

Despite this, Anderson does think an investigation is needed to nail down the virus’s origin once and for all. She’s dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued.

One of a dozen experts appointed to an international taskforce in November to study the origins of the virus, Anderson hasn’t sought public attention, especially since being targeted by U.S. extremists in early 2020 after she exposed false information about the pandemic posted online. The vitriol that ensued prompted her to file a police report. The threats of violence many coronavirus scientists have experienced over the past 18 months have made them hesitant to speak out because of the risk that their words will be misconstrued.

The elements known to trigger infectious outbreaks—the mixing of humans and animals, especially wildlife—were present in Wuhan, creating an environment conducive for the spillover of a new zoonotic disease. In that respect, the emergence of Covid-19 follows a familiar pattern. What’s shocking to Anderson is the way it unfurled into a global contagion.

“The pandemic is something no one could have imagined on this scale,” she said. Researchers must study Covid's calamitous path to determine what went wrong and how to stop the spread of future pathogens with pandemic potential.

“The virus was in the right place at the right time and everything lined up to cause this disaster.”