[W]hen I learned that Lord Matt Ridley had been invited to speak at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) about his search for the origins of COVID-19 by NIH Director “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya, I reacted like John Wick after his dog got killed. I felt a return of the fighting spirit ….
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Ridley’s talk was so devoid of facts, expertise, or good faith, I got pretty fired up about it. Excessive emotion is one of my many disqualifying flaws, according to Ridley, a trait I share with climate scientist Michael Mann, environmental activists, trans people, and the terrorists in Hamas.
The only thing extreme about my emotional state with Ridley is my epic level of annoyance with this obnoxious man, who seems to think that constantly lying about everything from his qualifications to his basic understanding of virology to his intent in advancing right wing political interests in a foreign country is okay so long as you do it politely. …
In my view, it is decidedly uncivil to accuse people of starting a pandemic that killed 20 million people without any evidence to support the allegation, as Ridley has. He insinuates that the pandemic was started by a group of my American colleagues, namely Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, in collaboration with Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Ridley implies this was all funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci ….
The totality of the evidence—and there’s a lot—is consistent with spillover from animals to humans at the Huanan market in Wuhan, China, under extremely similar circumstances as SARS-CoV-1. It is incompatible with all lab leak hypotheses proposed. It’s true that the evidence base is incomplete (the WHO origins report mapped out gaps to fill), but that does not mean it is uninformative. It’s very clear what it suggests, if you look only at the evidence and resist Ridley’s urge to indulge in unsupported speculation. This is what it shows.
1. Early cases cluster around the Huanan market
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2. Genetic evidence proves the virus was in the part of the market where they sold live animals
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3. Genetic evidence proves susceptible hosts were present in the section of the market where they sold live animals and where the virus was
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4. There were two separate spillovers
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5. The evidence is not consistent with any plausible lab leak scenario
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The evidence is clear: all of the evidence aligns with SARS-CoV-2 emerging into the human population by zoonotic spillover at the Huanan market. None of the evidence, except for the pandemic starting in Wuhan, is consistent with a lab leak. We need to understand how pandemics begin to effectively respond to them, much less prevent them. My co-authors and I have done that, as have many of our colleagues.
The NIH Director (and Acting CDC Director) are rejecting this in favor of politics. It will cripple our health and economy in the process, and slow our engine of American innovation to a grinding halt. We will all become sicker, not more healthy. By using the lab leak to justify defunding research across the board, we will shut off our pipeline of new medicines and vaccines. We will be sitting ducks for the next pandemic, with nothing ready to go, and no ability to study anything quickly enough to make a difference.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen is an American virologist and researcher at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Find Angela on X @angie_rasmussen
A version of this article was originally posted at Rasmussen Retorts and is reposted here. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find Rasmussen Retorts on Substack
