"Rutgers University molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright said in his opening statement before the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the “large preponderance of evidence indicates SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, entered humans through a research incident.”
Ebright, who was joined in arguing for the so-called “lab-leak theory” by Dr. Steven Quay, a former professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, added that “no — zero — secure evidence points to COVID’s natural origins.”
“The probability this actually came from nature based on these features is one in a million,” Quay concurred.
COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, more than 800 miles from “the closest bats harboring SARS-CoV-2 live viruses that could have served as progenitors,” Ebright explained.
The now-debarred Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the “global epicenter of research on bat SARS viruses,” he went on, carried out US-funded, gain-of-function research on the viruses between 2014 and 2021.
During that research period, the WIV conducted “the world’s largest research program on bat SARS viruses” and had “the world’s largest collection of bat SARS viruses” — including “the virus most closely similar to SARS-CoV-2,” Ebright added
Additionally, the Rutgers prof said, the Wuhan lab obtained SARS viruses that had a “high pandemic potential” in the four years before COVID-19 — and just one year earlier, had run research that genetically modified the viruses “that match in detail the features of SARS-CoV-2.”
msn.com |
