An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calls for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that could shed light on the origins of Covid.
Sharon Lerner
May 19 2022
In an article published Thursday, economist Jeffrey Sachs called for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that could shed light on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sachs and his co-author, Neil Harrison, a Columbia University professor of molecular pharmacology and therapeutics, said that federal agencies and universities possess evidence that has not been adequately reviewed, including virus databases, biological samples, viral sequences, email communications, and laboratory notebooks. Sachs and Harrison also highlighted a tantalizing scientific detail that may be an indication that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, originated in a laboratory: a sequence of eight amino acids on a critical part of the virus’s spike protein that is identical to an amino acid sequence found in cells that line human airways.
After leading the mainstream scientific inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, Sachs is now skewering it. “A steady trickle of disquieting information has cast a darkening cloud over the agency,” he and Harrison write of the NIH, going on to accuse the entire federal government of not doing enough to explore the possible role of its grantees in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and investigate “overlooked details” such as the matching amino acid sequences.
A call for an independent inquiry into the origin ofthe SARS-CoV-2 virus
Neil L. Harrison nh2298@columbia.edu and Jeffrey D. Sachs sachs@ei.columbia.eduAuthors Info & Affiliations
May 19, 2022
119 (21) e2202769119
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
Since the identification of theSARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, China, in January 2020 (1), the origin of the virus has been a topic of intense scientific debate and public speculation. The two main hypotheses are that the virus emerged from human exposure to an infected animal [“zoonosis” (2)] or that it emerged in a research-related incident (3). The investigation into the origin of the virus has been made difficult by the lack of key evidence from the earliest days of the outbreak—there’s no doubt that greater transparency on the part of Chinese authorities would be enormously helpful. Nevertheless, we argue here that there is much important information that can be gleaned from US-based research institutions, information not yet made available for independent, transparent, and scientific scrutiny.
Information now held by the research team headed by EHA (7), as well as the communications of that research team with US research funding agencies, including NIH, USAID, DARPA, DTRA, and the Department of Homeland Security, could shed considerable light on the experiments undertaken by the US-funded research team and on the possible relationship, if any, between those experiments and the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. We do not assert that laboratory manipulation was involved in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, although it is apparent that it could have been. However, we do assert that there has been no independent and transparent scientific scrutiny to date of the full scope of the US-based evidence.
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