COVID origin: Amateur investigators claim to break Wuhan lab secrets and embarrassed the media
DRASTIC stands for "decentralised radical autonomous search team investigating Covid-19" and it has set itself the mission of exploring the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
FollowAs the entire world scramble to find answers to the origin of the lethal Covid virus, a group of amateur sleuths called 'DRASTIC', with few resources, has claimed to reveal the dark secrets of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) secrets, the media reported on Wednesday.
The Washington Post in early 2020 accused Senator Tom Cotton of "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." CNN jumped in with "How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family." Most other mainstream outlets, from The New York Times ("fringe theory") to NPR ("Scientists debunk lab accident theory"), were equally dismissive. (Newsweek was an exception, reporting in April 2020 that the WIV was involved in gain-of-function research and might have been the site of a lab leak; Mother Jones, Business Insider, the NY Post and FOX News were also exceptions.)
The people responsible for uncovering this evidence are not journalists or spies or scientists. They are a group of amateur sleuths, with few resources except curiosity and a willingness to spend days combing the internet for clues. Throughout the pandemic, about two dozen or so correspondents, many anonymous, working independently from many different countries, have uncovered obscure documents, pieced together the information, and explained it all in long threads on Twitter—in a kind of open-source, collective brainstorming session that was part forensic science, part citizen journalism, and entirely new, the report further stated.
DRASTIC stands for "decentralised radical autonomous search team investigating Covid-19" and it has set itself the mission of exploring the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
"Thanks to DRASTIC, we now know that the WIV had an extensive collection of coronaviruses gathered over many years of foraging in the bat caves and that many of them -- including the closest-known relative to the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2 -- came from a mineshaft where three men died from a suspected SARS-like disease in 2012," Newsweek reported on Wednesday.
"We know that the WIV was actively working with these viruses, using inadequate safety protocols, in ways that could have triggered the pandemic and that the lab and Chinese authorities have gone to great lengths to conceal these activities," the report added.
According to the report, the first cases appeared weeks before the outbreak at the Huanan wet market that was once thought to be ground zero.
None of this proves that the pandemic started in the Wuhan lab. But the evidence assembled by DRASTIC amounts to what prosecutors call probable cause -- a strong, evidence-based case for a full investigation.
It is not clear that the best efforts of the US and other nations to investigate the lab-leak hypothesis will ever turn up unequivocal evidence one way or another, at least without the full cooperation of China, which is unlikely, the report said.
Meanwhile, the former head of the US Food and Drug Administration recently said that there is less evidence now to show that the novel coronavirus developed naturally -- jumping from an animal to humans, strengthening the argument for Covid-19 originating in a lab.
"The side of the ledger that suggests that this could have come out of a lab has continued to expand, and the side of the ledger that suggests this has come from of a zoonotic source, come out of nature, really hasn't budged, and if anything, you can argue that that side of the ledger has contracted," the New York Post quoted Scott Gottlieb as saying on CBS' "Face the Nation".
Last year, then US President Donald Trump had hit out at China for not stopping the Covid-19 pandemic and used the term "China virus" and urged his supporters not to call it coronavirus, saying the name sounds like a "beautiful place" in Italy.
However, the comment attracted a lot of criticism against Trump.
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