“Someone could have been sampling viruses from different caves for a decade and just playing mix-and-match in the lab, and those viruses could be so different from one another that none of our vaccines will work on them. We need to find where this came from, and close it down.” — Alina Chan, molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, in a September 9, 2020 interview with Boston Magazine
As we’ve argued from the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s important to know how to protect yourself against the virus.
But it’s equally important to know how to protect against future, potentially worse, outbreaks. That means understanding where the virus came from, and what made it so dangerous for some, especially vulnerable, people.
Getting to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins hasn’t been easy, thanks to a whole lot of “global gaslighting of the media—and, by proxy, the public,” according to the reporter for Boston Magazine, who wrote:
“There’s long been a sense that if the public and politicians really knew about the dangerous pathogen research being conducted in many laboratories, they’d be outraged. Denying the possibility of a catastrophic incident like this, then, could be seen as a form of career preservation [for scientists]. ‘For the substantial subset of virologists who perform gain-of-function research,’ Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and another founding member of the Cambridge Working Group, told me, ‘avoiding restrictions on research funding, avoiding implementation of appropriate biosafety standards, and avoiding implementation of appropriate research oversight are powerful motivators. Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, ‘it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.’”
Fortunately, some scientists aren’t afraid to speak truth to power. One of those is Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.
Chan, whose work is featured in the Boston magazine piece, couldn’t continue her own research while quarantined at home.
So Chan, along with a colleague from her days at the University of British Columbia, started digging into the possible origins of COVID-19.
What they discovered, and what they published, is not what Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Biotech—or the scientists (and their funders) in our Gain-of-Function Hall of Shame—want you to believe.