State Department officials fought over the theory of laboratory leakage

In the last days of the Trump administration, the State Department was embroiled in a bitter conflict over the role China played in the origins of COVID-19, which is now spreading to the public.

In one open letter Former International Secretary of Security and Non-Proliferation Christopher Ford told the Medium newspaper on Thursday that he had intervened to prevent the U.S. government from “embarrassing and discrediting” him, accusing China of deliberately designing the coronavirus – despite no evidence to that effect.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Ford said his colleagues are putting pressure on China in a State Department report submitted to the International Convention on Biological Weapons Congress, which could start a diplomatic crisis with one of the world’s main rivals.

It is very unusual for former senior State Department officials to publish a personal account of recent internal conflicts. But Ford’s open letter comes amid a heated debate over the so-called “laboratory escape” hypothesis for the creation of COVID-19. According to the most extreme version of this theory, Chinese scientists designed SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon.

Equipped with his account emails Enter du public domain according to Fox News and Vanity Fair, Ford’s Medium Posts David Asher, a contractor with David Asher who was investigating the origins of COVID-19, and Thomas DiNanno, a former acting head of the Office of Weapons Control, Verification, and an increasingly close relationship. Compliance (AVC). According to Vanity Fair, Asher and DiNanno argued that Ford had the virus as a naturally thought-out consequence of its natural origin.

In the mid-term release, Ford said DiNanno was “allegedly investigating” a virus that violated the Biological Weapons Convention. ”He added:“ They seem to believe that the COVID-19 biological weapons (BW) effort was wrong – or perhaps a BW agent deliberately threw it into the world. that he had “.

“It was clear they were coming from a biological weapons perspective,” Ford told BuzzFeed News. “If you back down if there was any evidence in favor of finding a biological weapon against the coronavirus that got the knots, but it looked like they were trying to build a case.”

Ford also told BuzzFeed News that Asher and DiNann wanted to claim that China had violated the Biological Weapons Convention annual report Prepared for Congress by the State Department. The report mandated by U.S. law provides details of the nations. compliance with international agreements about arms control, proliferation and disarmament.

“Their legal arguments seemed pretty weak to me. They never presented any real evidence [bioweapons] the job, ”Ford said, adding that his colleagues are also arguing that China should not be found to be in breach of the Biological Weapons Convention because it does not fully answer questions about the COVID-19 crisis.

In his open letter, Ford also complained that military historian Miles Yu and a Chinese political specialist told DiNanno that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wanted to exclude departmental bioweapons experts and the intelligence community from the department’s investigation. Origin of COVID-19. Since the spring of 2020, Trump and Pompey have done just that he claimed to have evidence the virus was extracted from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Yu denied Pompeo’s claim that he wanted to prevent experts from reviewing the investigation. “The AVC consultation was by no means a rough and tumble operation: it collaborated with our national science labs, renowned scientists around the world with serious but different opinions, and various agencies in the intelligence community,” Yu told BuzzFeed News in an email. “Chris Ford is creating a narrative against the facts to cover up the hostility against what is worthwhile in any science-based research that Secretary Pompeo supports and encourages.

Asher also discussed Ford’s account. “I was shocked when Ford didn’t do an investigation when I arrived and started trying to get to the bottom of possible violations in China. [Biological Weapons Convention]. The work that should continue in AVC, ”he said in an email.

DiNanno did not respond to questions from BuzzFeed News, citing his account in the Vanity Fair article.

The debate over the origin of the virus has intensified since the end of March, when an articulation occurred WHO-China report he came empty-handed however, he described a lab escape as “very unlikely.” This prompted the US and 13 other governments issue a statement calling for “transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence”.

May 26, President Joe Biden he revealed that he had promised The 90-day intelligence review examines two scenarios: whether coronaviruses spread naturally from animals to people, or whether they were released in a laboratory accident. And in a call on Friday with a senior Chinese official, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken he pressed China Enable WHO experts to further study the origin of coronavirus.

Leading scientists have also recently called for a more in-depth study of the origins of COVID-19. Writing in the journal Science The WHO-China study “did not consider the balance between the two theories.”

Ford is conservative record of having a portfolio About the threats posed by China to the US. What sparked his open letter was that his former colleagues, in his view, misrepresented that the coronavirus was contrary to the idea that it could escape the laboratory.

“Strongly supported Looking at the “lab escape” hypothesis, it’s clear that it’s a real option, “Ford wrote in his Medium message.” But I’m not just saying that now. I said that at the time. A lot. “

The laboratory escape hypothesis is not a single unified theory, but a constellation of ideas Origin of COVID-19.

Emana history of skating in virology laboratories around the world, and due to China’s complete lack of transparency, many scientists agree that there is no way to rule out the possibility of the virus being picked up from wild animals and accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan. Global attention has been focused on the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where a team led by Shi Zhengli has cataloged dangerous coronaviruses found by bats.

More elaborate versions of the theory assume that scientists at WIV or another city laboratory were involved in well-intentioned but dangerous “function-gain” experiments by genetically modifying a coronavirus to study changes that would be likely. to infect people.

The suspicion has fallen on Shiren because she had been there before collaborated in related experiments Ralph Baric, of the University of North Carolina, is headed by virologist Chapel Hill. Baric’s team assembled a spinal protein from one of the Shi bat coronaviruses, which it uses to attach to infected cells, in another coronavirus adapted to infect mice.

Shi has refused to conduct similar profit function experiments since the 2015 publication of this study. But the secrecy of research in WIV and other labs means that speculation about that possibility continues.

The most extreme idea considered by most experts as a conspiracy theory is by Chinese military scientists deliberately designed SARS-CoV-2, a virus that causes COVID-19, as a bioweapon.

In its mid-term message, Ford accuses DiNanno of “dragging his feet” for obtaining bioweapon claims examined by the intelligence community and scientific experts. On January 7 this year, Baric and David Relman attended an online meeting with scientists including Stanford University microbiologists. over and over again he argued that the theory of laboratory leakage deserves in-depth research to be examined by the State Department.

They reported on Steven Quay, CEO of the biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics, and performed a statistical analysis.beyond reasonable doubt”SARS-CoV-2 was created in a laboratory. According to Vanity Fair, Baric criticized the presentation of the Quay, saying that it rejects many bat coronaviruses that are unknown to science.

Ford sent a summary of the meeting to State Department colleagues the next day, he wrote: “[H]statistical analysis is essential because there is no data to support key model inputs. Critically, we don’t have data on most wild coronavavirus bats. ”Ford left the State Department the same day after announcing his intention to step down earlier.

DiNanno then he replied: “On the contrary, we don’t need to know every genome of bat coronavirus to understand the possibility of being zoonotic [natural] the origin of the laboratory vs. All we have to do is reliably calculate the number of bat coronaviruses, and we need to take this into account given our current knowledge of bat coronaviruses. “

Baric and Relman did not respond to requests for comment.

In an email to BuzzFeed News, Quay defended his own statistical analysis, saying it has been viewed more than 160,000 times online. “I have not received any critical criticism of my work,” he said. “The sense of the meeting was that they were trying as hard as they could to get me released, to write their report and move on to something else.”

January 15, Pompey State Department “technical file”China criticized the secrecy of China over COVID-19 in WIV activities.

Instead, he noted, based on intelligence reports, that the U.S. government “believes there are reasons why several researchers within the WIV fell ill in the fall of 2019 before identifying the first case of the outbreak, with symptoms COVID-19 and common seasonal diseases.”

In the fact sheet, the U.S. reiterated long-standing concerns about China’s transparency in bioweapons in the past: “The United States has been publicly concerned for many years about China’s past biological weapons work. despite the Biological Weapons Convention “. WIV said it has been collaborating on classified investigations on behalf of the Chinese military since 2017.

But the document did not claim that SARS-CoV-2 was a product of Chinese bioweapons research.