The human apes living today are just one of many human species. We are the only humans who didn't go extinct.

        New York Times

BREAKING NEWS

A fossilized skull found in China could be a new species of ancient human, a team of scientists said. One expert called it “a beautiful thing.”

Friday, June 25, 2021 11:17 AM EST

Scientists on Friday announced that a massive fossilized skull that is at least 140,000 years old may be a new species of ancient human. It belonged to a mature male who had a huge brain, massive brow ridges, deep set eyes and a bulbous nose. The skull had remained hidden in an abandoned well for 85 years, after a laborer came across it at a construction site in China.

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I have just one comment: FUCK YOU CHINA.

        New York Times

BREAKING NEWS

Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong, said that it would shut down by Saturday after the police froze its accounts and arrested staff.

Wednesday, June 23, 2021 4:04 AM EST

The closure will silence one of the biggest and most aggressive media outlets in the city, highlighting the vast reach of the security law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing last year.

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NATO members to China: Fuck you assholes.

Wall Street Journal

WORLD

ASIA

CHINA

Back-to-Back Rebukes of China Mark a Turning Point

Criticism from G-7 and NATO members represent a shift toward collective action to confront Beijing.

By James T. Areddy

June 15, 2021

Major democracies rallied together this week to issue extraordinary back-to-back rebukes of Beijing, marking a shift toward collective action and pushing back against President Xi Jinping’s strategies to position China as a global leader.

Over two consecutive days, Group of Seven leaders and North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations jointly criticized core Chinese policy under Mr. Xi as damaging to military stability, human rights, international trade and global health. NATO members vowed Monday to counter “systemic challenges to the rules-based international order” posed by China.

A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry rejected the statements as the misguided work of “small circles” and primarily the U.S. Speaking at a regular briefing on Tuesday, spokesman Zhao Lijian said, “The U.S. is sick, and it’s very sick. The G-7 should check America’s pulse and prescribe drugs for it.”

The one-two punch of public criticism smacks directly into Mr. Xi’s assertion that China won’t stand for lecturing by other nations, suggesting anxiety in key capitals is prompting governments to seek alignment with the U.S. over attempting to manage the relationship with Beijing on their own.

“China’s behavior changed the risk calculus,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown University professor. “A very significant geopolitical threshold has been crossed.”

The international backlash comes as the Chinese Communist Party is preparing to put Mr. Xi at the center of its 100th anniversary celebration in two weeks, the successful emergence from a century of struggles and humiliation by foreign powers to become the world’s top trading nation and second biggest economy.

The broadsides from the G-7 and NATO aren’t likely by themselves to undermine Mr. Xi’s powerful standing in China, said Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. As criticism builds against Mr. Xi in major nations, the question for China’s leadership is how much it values its international standing. In Beijing, Mr. Hass added, “It could open the aperture on the question of, are we on the right track?”

China frames criticism of its policies as U.S.-led Cold War thinking, with its diplomats confidently asserting that the East is rising and the West is in decline. Hours after the G-7 event concluded, China’s embassy in the U.K., where the summit was held, issued a point-by-point denunciation of the communiqué as distorted and slanderous.

Discontent about China has built for some time among democratic nations that are concerned about its detention of Muslim Uyghurs, undoing of freedoms in Hong Kong, coercive trade practices and military provocations against the democratic island Taiwan, and all were highlighted in the G-7’s statement. The grouping of the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan also expressed concern that Beijing has lacked transparency on Covid-19, while touching generally on treatment of prisoners, internet censorship and other features of Mr. Xi’s strongman rule.

China considers each issue its own business and in its embassy retort said the G-7 “arbitrarily interfered in China’s internal affairs.”

Mr. Xi hardly needs problems with the international community, which supplies investment and creates jobs, as well as buys its exports. A resurgence of Covid-19 in China’s south is dinging confidence in the nation’s pandemic response, including China-made vaccines. China wants multinational corporations to resist calls by human-rights groups to boycott next February’s Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.

And the party’s 100th anniversary celebration is a prelude to Mr. Xi’s expected bid for a third term late next year.

President Biden vowed his China policy would feature alliance building to hold China accountable and the G-7 and NATO events marked his first opportunity to promote the vision on an international stage.

The communiqué language required buy-in from participants, including European nations that enjoy massive trade with China. European governments have usually refrained from pointed complaints about China, but in recent months bristled when Beijing imposed sanctions on European politicians, companies and think tanks.

Mr. Hass said Beijing can be expected to argue the G-7 “represents a small number of countries that do not speak on behalf of the international community.”

The G-7 language was tougher on China than the document produced by the larger, 30-member NATO grouping. For instance, Taiwan went unnamed by the security alliance while the G-7 statement devoted a paragraph to calls for stability in the Taiwan Strait and neighboring seas, which China claims as its sovereign domain. It was the first-ever mention of that hot-button issue in such a communiqué, according to the University of Toronto’s G-7 Research Group.

Indeed, government-run media outlets in China mocked the G-7 by showing a rendering of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper” that was widely circulated online. Titled “The Last G-7,” it showed the familiar New Testament scene but with a red cake in the shape of China in front of the Jesus character—Mr. Biden as a bald eagle in this case—directing the others, also depicted as animals.

China’s state-controlled news agency, meanwhile, described the G-7 leaders’ gathering as an “anxious show of unity” and denounced the in-person event amid a pandemic.

Before the pandemic shut down his travel, Mr. Xi relied heavily on personal appearances, and the loans of government-run banks, to expand Beijing’s influence. He used the vacuum created by former President Donald Trump’s downgrade of international groupings to emphasize China’s commitment to multilateral diplomacy in global organizations like the United Nations and World Trade Organization. But he hasn’t met another head of state in person since early 2020, according to research firm China Vitae.

China is also part of the Group of 20, where the Biden administration says it wants Beijing’s support for climate initiatives and an agreement to set a minimum international tax rate for big companies. Like other members, China enjoys an effective veto in such groups.

The G-7 and NATO positions underscore deepening divisions of their members with China that risk a new type of Cold War, says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. But he said Mr. Xi will be missing the point if he feels isolated by the statements. “The message of the G-7 is the democracies of the world are taking note of what China is doing,” he said.

But if current trends continue and the split gets bigger, it could hurt China’s leadership at home. Mr. Diamond said. “People in China may be asking who lost the United States.”

To blunt foreign criticism of its policies in the past, China has effectively relied on the lure of its massive market. Increasingly, however, Chinese leaders’ message is failing to resonate, in part because of how quickly Beijing has acted to make its market inaccessible, most recently in a dispute with Australia. “Economic success is not going to get them the plaudits that they crave,” said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser in Washington at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr. Xi himself has added a tone of pique, saying China won’t be pushed around. He has also telegraphed the message through deputies whose new more strident tones are sometimes called “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy—to plaudits at home and chagrin internationally.

When Mr. Biden dispatched his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to meet Chinese diplomats in Alaska in March, he was lectured in front of cameras for 16 minutes about racial problems and democratic failings in the U.S. by Beijing’s top envoy, Yang Jiechi.

Days before Mr. Biden flew to Europe, Mr. Xi appeared to soften the line, telling party cadres China the world needs to recognize a “credible, lovable, and respectable China.”

In terms of policy, however, China has shown no signs of bowing to foreign pressure, with its legislature last week approving a law that would allow Beijing to strike back at governments, companies and individuals seen as contributing to efforts by foreign governments to penalize China.

Appeared in the June 15, 2021, print edition as 'Back-to-Back Rebukes of China Mark Turning Point.'

China's dictatorship lies about everything.

Wall Street Journal

OPINION

COMMENTARY

Beijing Protests a Lab Leak Too Much

Strong evidence the virus escaped: the Communist Party’s vicious attacks on anyone who speaks out.

By Perry Link

June 13, 2021

I am as eager as anyone to follow the world’s virologists as they try to determine how Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China. But as a longtime student of Chinese Communist political language, I will need considerable persuading that the disease came from bats or a wet market. The linguistic evidence is overwhelming that Chinese leaders believe the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source.

Many years ago a distinguished Chinese writer, Wu Zuxiang, explained to me that there is truth in Communist Party pronouncements, but you have to read them “upside down.” If a newspaper says “the Party has made great strides against corruption in Henan,” then you know that corruption has recently been especially bad in Henan. If you read about the heroic rescue of eight miners somewhere, you can guess that a mine collapse might have killed hundreds who aren’t mentioned. Read upside-down, there is a sense in which the official press never lies. It cannot lie. It has to tell you what the party wants you to believe, and if you can figure out the party’s motive—which always exists—then you have a sense of the truth.

A few years ago another outstanding Chinese writer, Su Xiaokang, brought me one step deeper. You Westerners, he explained, are too hung up on the question of whether propaganda is true or not. For the regime, truth and falsity are beside the point. A statement might be true, false or partly true. What matters is only whether it works. Does it advance the interests of the party? The top leaders hand out words and phrases for their minions to use, like trowels in a garden. The minions dig with them.

After the Communist Party locked down the city of Wuhan in winter 2020, a local writer named Fang Fang began recording the conditions and moods of the people around her and posting entries on the Internet. “Fang Fang’s Diary” quickly attracted a large following, and the author became known as “the conscience of Wuhan.” Michael Berry, a UCLA professor of Asian languages and cultures who was translating one of the author’s novels, went to work on her posts as well. They were published last summer by HarperCollins.

The book, “Wuhan Diary,” consists of plain truth-telling. It is unadorned, simple language that stood out in Wuhan only because no one else was daring to write anything. But the regime’s response was to attack Fang Fang more ferociously than any Chinese writer has been attacked since Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. In his day, Mao had made “struggle” a transitive verb: to struggle someone was to surround him or her, in the street or on a stage, and hurl taunts, insults, threats and demands for confessions; no bystander would dare speak for the struggled for fear of becoming the next target. Verbal abuse often led to physical beatings, sometimes even to death.

Xi Jinping has revived struggle in a form that might be called “cyberstruggle.” The young zealots of Mao’s era, called Red Guards, have been replaced by equally frenetic strugglers nicknamed “Little Pinks.” In spring of 2020, Little Pinks and others struggled Fang Fang: “Down with the imperialist running dog and traitor to China, Fang Fang!” To them, the diary was a “pile of messed up garbage and fabricated rumors [that] should be called ‘Fang Fang’s Sexual Fantasies’!” She received death threats. A witch hunt identified her supporters and began to struggle them, too. Mr. Berry, her translator, wasn’t spared. Hundreds of text messages arrived on his cell phone: “You ugly white devil, feasting on the flesh of man and drinking human blood, the eighteen realms of hell were created especially for you!”; “If you ever set foot in China again I will kill you”; and others.

The invective may tell us something about the origins of Covid. Two facts are worth noting. First, the attacks are coordinated, not a random explosion of vitriol. Second, they are much stronger—orders of magnitude stronger—than other verbal attacks on individuals in China recently have been. These two facts, taken together, make it all but certain that the campaign against Fang Fang came from the top.

Borrowing Wu Zuxiang’s technique of reading “upside down,” what the Fang Fang campaign tells us is that Xi Jinping is extremely worried that the world will hold his regime responsible for the pandemic. The most radioactive question has been where the virus originated. Fang Fang made no mention of whether the virus originated in a wet market or a lab; she merely documented all of the suffering that began in Wuhan. The regime’s focus on the origins question alone all but screams a truth.

The Chinese Communist Party’s official account of the virus is that it “jumped” from bats to humans at a wet market not far from the Wuhan lab. The city government was quick to close down that market, seal it off and provide the world with photos showing that the sealing had been done. Why were the authorities so swift and conspicuous? Because they suspected the wet market or because they wanted the world to? If they were certain that Mother Nature was the culprit, why silence their scientists and seal laboratory records? And why begin a vicious cyberstruggle against someone who records daily life as she sees it?

Mr. Link is a professor of Chinese at the University of California, Riverside and an emeritus professor of East Asian studies at Princeton.

Appeared in the June 14, 2021, print edition.

I have just one comment about this article: FUCK YOU CHINA.

Wall Street Journal

OPINION

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW

A Scientist Who Said No to Covid Groupthink

Many experts aggressively denied a lab leak was possible and only now admit it. It took courage to make the case a year ago.

By Adam O’Neal

June 11, 2021

A few months before Covid-19 became a pandemic, Filippa Lentzos started reading about unusual flu cases in Wuhan, China. Ms. Lentzos, a social scientist who studies biological threats, belongs to an email group she describes as consisting of “ex-intelligence, bioweapons specialists, experts, former State Department diplomats” and others “who have worked in arms control, biological disarmament.”

As Chinese authorities struggled to contain the outbreak, she recalls, the expert circle asked questions about the pathogen’s origin: “Is this security related? Is it military? Is there something dodgy going on? What information are we not getting here?” They asked these questions “not because we are conspiracy theorists. This is our profession,” Ms. Lentzos, 44, says in a video interview from her home in Switzerland. As the coronavirus and alarm about it spread, nonexperts started asking similar questions—only to be mocked or silenced by journalists, social-media companies and prominent scientists.

By spring 2020, top Republicans—including Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump—were arguing that the pandemic could have started at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had conducted experiments on coronaviruses. “For me, the lab leak was always on the table,” Ms. Lentzos says. “For a lot of us in the biological weapons, security world.” But in February 2020, a group of scientists had published a statement in the Lancet calling out “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The New York Times and Washington Post dutifully attacked Mr. Cotton as unhinged. Media, with an assist from some virologists, dismissed the lab-leak theory as “debunked.”

Ms. Lentzos, who places her own politics on the Swiss “center left,” thought that conclusion premature and said so publicly. In May 2020, she published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists weighing whether “safety lapses in the course of basic scientific research” caused the pandemic. While acknowledging there was, “as of yet, little concrete evidence,” she noted “several indications that collectively suggest this is a serious possibility that needs following up by the international community.”

She was suggesting an accident, not a deliberate release: “If you’re culturing a virus that is readily able to infect humans, particularly via the respiratory tract, then any droplet caused by a simple splash or aerosolization of liquid can be inhaled without you realizing it,” she wrote. “Could an unknowingly infected researcher showing no symptoms unwittingly have infected family, friends, and anyone else he or she was in contact with? Or was there perhaps an unnoticed leak of a coronavirus from the lab, from improperly incinerated waste material or animal carcasses that found their way to rubbish bins that rats or cats could have accessed?”

She was confident in her argument but “a bit wary about writing it” given that it challenged the enforced consensus. “It was really sticking my neck out, because no one else was saying it at the time, even a lot of people who know better. Everyone was just going with the narrative: ‘Yeah, no, it’s natural,’ and there’s no discussion.”

The article barely made a ripple. “If you look at the argumentation that’s used today, it’s exactly the same basically as what I laid out, which was, accidents happen,” she says. “We know that they’re having questions around safety. We know they were doing this field work. We see videos where they’re in breach of standard biosafety protocol. We know China is manipulating the narrative, closing down information sources—all of that stuff. All of that is in there. But it didn’t get much traction.”

That began to change early this year. Media outlets published articles considering the possibility of a lab leak. At least five of the Lancet signers have distanced themselves from the letter. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said the theory merits further study. President Biden ordered the intelligence community to investigate the question. Even Facebook reversed its ban.

It’s no coincidence that the debate shifted after Mr. Trump was voted out of office. Ms. Lentzos faults him for “meddling” in the debate. In April 2020 he suggested that the virus came from a Chinese lab but didn’t provide evidence. “Then very quickly, it became very politicized, that question.” American liberals—including many scientists—conflated open-mindedness about the question with support for Mr. Trump. Ms. Lentzos was one of the few who could separate their distaste for him from their analysis of the pandemic.

Another problem was confusion about the terms of debate. Many failed to distinguish between an accident and a weapon. The notion that China had created the virus with the intention to kill “was a possibility, and it was fairly soon disregarded,” Ms. Lentzos says. “The idea that it could be an accidental lab leak wasn’t really part of the narrative.”

The most significant problem came from the scientific community. “Some of the scientists in this area very quickly closed ranks,” she says, and partisanship wasn’t their only motive: “Like most things in life, there are power plays. There are agendas that are part of the scientific community. Just like any other community, there are strong vested interests. There were people that did not talk about this, because they feared for their careers. They feared for their grants.”

Ms. Lentzos counsels against idealizing scientists and in favor of “seeing science and scientific activity, and how the community works, not as this inner sacred sanctum that’s devoid of any conflicts of interests, or agendas, or any of that stuff, but seeing it as also a social activity, where there are good players and bad players.”

Take Peter Daszak, the zoologist who organized the Lancet letter condemning lab-leak “conspiracy theories.” He had directed millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through his nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance. A lab mistake that killed millions would be bad for his reputation. Other researchers have taken part in gain-of-function research, which can make viruses deadlier or easier to transmit. Who would permit, much less fund, such research if it proved so catastrophic? Yet researchers like Marion Koopmans, who oversees an institution that has conducted gain-of-function research, had an outsize voice in media. Both she and Mr. Daszak served on the World Health Organization’s origin investigation team.

A scientific consensus isn’t always true, and peer review can look like peer pressure. “How do we know what we know? Well, the way we know in science is you provide references to everything, all the claims that you make, and you can trace it back,” Ms. Lentzos says. The lab-leak theory began to be treated “like an attack on science, the sciences. And so the scientists were like, ‘Well, I trust other scientists,’ without actually doing the groundwork.” Few nonscientists, including journalists and social-media executives, even have the capacity to do the groundwork. “For many,” she says, “it was a shortcut. ‘Yeah, scientists are saying this and we also believe in those scientists.’ ”

Ms. Lentzos wasn’t alone in raising the lab-leak theory before it became widely respectable. This newspaper, for instance, ran an op-ed about it by Mr. Cotton the week before her article appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She acknowledges the point: “The open letters, all of The Wall Street Journal contributions in this area; also the Washington Post has done a fair bit on this. The New York Times has been totally silent. But there’s been a lot of ground preparation for people.”

The problem is, it matters who speaks. “Your institution, the fact that you have a doctorate, or the fact that you have previously gotten all of these grants make what you say weightier than what somebody else, even though they’re saying the same thing—even though they use the same evidence.” Ms. Lentzos has a doctorate in sociology and is an associate professor at King’s College London.

As an example, she compares a letter signed by several biologists and immunologists and published May 14 in Science with another, published earlier in the year, by a less specialized collection of experts known as “the Paris group.” The latter received “a lot of media attention and stuff, but scientists didn’t take that as seriously because it wasn’t the right voices saying it in the right outlets, even though there were many scientists in the group, and a much more diverse group, including biosafety experts like myself.” The difference in reception was striking, because both letters “said exactly the same thing.”

Ms. Lentzos says it’s possible Covid-19 originated in the wild, but “as time goes on, there has been more and more circumstantial evidence for the lab-leak theory that’s come out, and less and less from the natural-spillover theory.” With evidence mostly circumstantial, and the Chinese Communist Party stonewalling, can we ever know? “In a perfect world, it would be open; we’d have a serious forensic investigation,” she says. “Evidence has been deliberately taken away, or erased, but even time would have just done that anyway.”

She says that regardless of Covid’s origin, lab safety is crucial for preventing a future pandemic. “There needs to be a body, an international body that has a mandate to track and keep oversight of these kinds of facilities,” she says. “You’ve got to ingrain more of a safety and security culture in people and the labs.”

Are international institutions capable of the task? Ms. Lentzos has experience working with United Nations agencies, including the World Health Organization. “It was incredibly exciting to finally go in. And then you become more disillusioned when you see how things operate, how things don’t operate,” she says. “Like any large organization, they are slow, and inflexible, and bureaucratic.” But, she asks rhetorically, “What is the alternative?”

Last month she co-published a study on global lab safety, along with an interactive map that tracks biosafety level 4 laboratories such as the one in Wuhan. These labs work with the most dangerous pathogens, but “there’s no international body that has a mandate to track where they are, and to have any oversight over them. There’s no official list of how many of these labs there are in the world, or where they are.” The new project tracks each lab’s “levels of transparency, or training, or membership in various biosafety associations,” to assess its potential threat.

A more daunting task is reining in a rogue Beijing. “It’s more about the political narrative that you’re able to tell,” says Ms. Lentzos. The Communist Party has adopted a triumphant narrative about Covid-19—that despite early stumbles, it controlled the virus and let in international investigators. That’s technically true, Ms. Lentzos says, but misleading, since the investigators were provided with little useful information.

“This is where China’s foreign policy of the Belt and Road Initiative, of vaccine diplomacy, comes in,” she says. Aid from China comes with the implicit condition that the recipient won’t criticize Beijing in venues like the U.N. General Assembly or World Health Assembly. Ms. Lentzos urges the U.S. and other nations to build a broad coalition—beyond Europe and the English-speaking world—to demand a real forensic investigation. Beijing may not yield, but “you force China to say, ‘No, we’re not going to let you do that,’ ” she says. “Then they’re on the back foot.”

She concedes it’s unlikely “we’ll get anywhere on the origins. We’re not going to find the smoking gun. But I do think we have power to change that narrative.”

Mr. O’Neal is a European-based editorial page writer for the Journal.

Appeared in the June 12, 2021, print edition.

Fucktard China knows this and they are trying to cover it up: "The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak."

Wall Street Journal

OPINION

COMMENTARY

The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak

The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.

By Steven Quay and Richard Muller

June 6, 2021

The possibility that the pandemic began with an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is attracting fresh attention. President Biden has asked the national intelligence community to redouble efforts to investigate.

Much of the public discussion has focused on circumstantial evidence: mysterious illnesses in late 2019; the lab’s work intentionally supercharging viruses to increase lethality (known as “gain of function” research). The Chinese Communist Party has been reluctant to release relevant information. Reports based on U.S. intelligence have suggested the lab collaborated on projects with the Chinese military.

But the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. In particular, consider the genetic fingerprint of CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the disease Covid-19.

In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location. Doing this leaves no trace of manipulation. But it alters the virus spike protein, rendering it easier for the virus to inject genetic material into the victim cell. Since 1992 there have been at least 11 separate experiments adding a special sequence to the same location. The end result has always been supercharged viruses.

A genome is a blueprint for the factory of a cell to make proteins. The language is made up of three-letter “words,” 64 in total, that represent the 20 different amino acids. For example, there are six different words for the amino acid arginine, the one that is often used in supercharging viruses. Every cell has a different preference for which word it likes to use most.

In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.

In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.

Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.

When the lab’s Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin?

But in a matter of weeks virologists Bruno Coutard and colleagues published their discovery of the sequence in CoV-2 and its novel supercharged site. Double CGG is there; you only have to look. They comment in their paper that the protein that held it “may provide a gain-of-function” capability to the virus, “for efficient spreading” to humans.

There is additional scientific evidence that points to CoV-2’s gain-of-function origin. The most compelling is the dramatic differences in the genetic diversity of CoV-2, compared with the coronaviruses responsible for SARS and MERS.

Both of those were confirmed to have a natural origin; the viruses evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated. Covid-19 didn’t work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral “improvement” took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.

Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread. Science knows of only one way that could be achieved: simulated natural evolution, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved. That is precisely what is done in gain-of-function research. Mice that are genetically modified to have the same coronavirus receptor as humans, called “humanized mice,” are repeatedly exposed to the virus to encourage adaptation.

The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.

Dr. Quay is founder of Atossa Therapeutics and author of “Stay Safe: A Physician’s Guide to Survive Coronavirus.” Mr. Muller is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California Berkeley and a former senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Appeared in the June 7, 2021, print edition.

Liars for China.

Wall Street Journal

OPINION

COMMENTARY

Fauci Email Bolsters the Lab-Leak Theory

A top scientist said the virus couldn’t have evolved naturally—then reversed his position weeks later.

By Nicholas Wade

June 4, 2021

They told the world that the Covid-19 virus clearly couldn’t have been manipulated in the laboratory. But what they actually thought at first sight was that it had been.

The letter from five virologists published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was the single most influential statement in capturing the public narrative about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Here was an authoritative statement from leading experts assuring the public that in terms of the virus’s origin “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

But that’s the exact opposite of what these experts thought after taking their first look at the virus. A large batch of emails exchanged with Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was made available this week to BuzzFeed and the Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. For the most part the emails concern meeting arrangements or messages from cranks and have been redacted of any meaningful information. But one significant email escaped the censor’s black marker.

On Jan. 31, 2020, shortly after the SARS-CoV-2 genome had been decoded, Kristian Andersen, the five virologists’ leader, emailed Dr. Fauci that there were “unusual features” in the virus. These took up only a small percentage of the genome, so that “one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”

Mr. Andersen went on to note that he and his team “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” It isn’t clear exactly what he meant by this striking phrase. But anything inconsistent with an evolutionary origin has to be man-made.

This remarkable email establishes that the Andersen team’s initial reaction was to suspect that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered in a lab. Their subsequent letter doesn’t adequately explain how they overcame this impression.

The furin cleavage site, a small element of the virus that they doubtless had in mind when referring to “unusual features,” is an anomalous genetic insertion that could be a sign of laboratory manipulation. The distinguished virologist David Baltimore has called it a smoking gun and “a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”

The Andersen team in its letter discusses how the virus could have acquired the furin cleavage site naturally. Their best suggestion is that SARS-CoV-2 picked up the necessary genetic information from people after it had made its jump from bats. But no evidence for this idea has emerged. And it’s hard to see why the Andersen team decided that this conjecture should outweigh the appearance of laboratory manipulation.

As virologists, all had a professional interest in not provoking a storm of public condemnation over gain-of-function experiments, the bland name for genetically enhancing the pathogenic power of viruses. After taking one look at the horrific possibility that a lab leak origin for SARS-CoV-2 might cause virology labs all over the world to be closed down, it would seem, the Andersen team decided to disregard their first impressions of possible manipulation. Recall what they said in their letter: “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Dr. Fauci has long suggested that the virus emerged naturally—until the past few weeks, when he started to allow that lab escape is possible and should be investigated. The Jan. 31, 2020, email from Mr. Andersen shows that Dr. Fauci knew from the beginning that experts had serious suspicions about the virus’s origins. There were many other matters on his agenda at the time, but it’s too bad he didn’t ask for an independent panel, one not dominated by virologists, to look into the possibility that Chinese researchers genetically manipulating coronaviruses in low-level safety conditions had sparked a global pandemic.

Dr. Fauci has long suggested that the virus emerged naturally—until the past few weeks, when he started to allow that lab escape is possible and should be investigated. The Jan. 31, 2020, email from Mr. Andersen shows that Dr. Fauci knew from the beginning that experts had serious suspicions about the virus’s origins. There were many other matters on his agenda at the time, but it’s too bad he didn’t ask for an independent panel, one not dominated by virologists, to look into the possibility that Chinese researchers genetically manipulating coronaviruses in low-level safety conditions had sparked a global pandemic.

Mr. Wade is a science writer who has worked for Nature, Science, and the New York Times.

Appeared in the June 5, 2021, print edition.

This has become more and more obvious. Fucktard China is covering up their "accidental leak from a virology lab with ties to China’s biological-warfare program". China stupidly created the coronavirus problem.

Wall Street Journal

OPINION

COMMENTARY

The World Needs Answers on Covid’s Origin

China wants the issue to go away. The U.S. should use all of its tools to keep the pressure on Beijing.

By David Asher

June 3, 2021

Covid-19 began trickling out of Wuhan, China, at least a year and a half ago. The world still knows far too little about the origins of the outbreak. Theories include a zoonotic host, a bat cave, a frozen food shipment from Southeast Asia, and—the likeliest explanation—an accidental leak from a virology lab with ties to China’s biological-warfare program.

Whatever you believe, getting to the bottom of the case demands American leaders apply new pressure on the Chinese Communist Party. It’s crucial that the world learn how the pandemic started and the extent to which Beijing’s lies fueled this global crisis. The U.S. must show that such malfeasance won’t be tolerated.

From the beginning, China crushed or co-opted good-faith efforts to understand the virus’s origin and spread. It made whistleblowers disappear, refused to turn over blood samples from early patients and destroyed the wet market. The Communist Party successfully pushed to exclude Taiwan from the 2020 World Health Assembly—depriving the world of the chance to learn from a state that had successfully contained the virus. Beijing spread misinformation by claiming that American soldiers visiting Wuhan had brought the virus to China. Perhaps most notably, the party played puppet master to the feckless World Health Organization investigation into the outbreak.

The only thing more surreal than the Chinese Communist Party’s “nothing to see here” attitude has been its uncritical acceptance by Western elites. But international demands for a deeper WHO investigation are growing, and the Biden administration has directed the U.S. intelligence community to report on the circumstances surrounding the virus’s origin.

It isn’t a bad start, but there’s more to be done. If the Biden administration means what it says about upholding the international rules-based order, it will impose consequences on countries that fail to abide by the rules. The administration should cite China for violating the WHO’s International Health Regulations by disregarding requests for consultations and refusing to share data with other member states.

Congress, with the administration’s full support, should empower an independent and bipartisan investigative commission to get to the bottom of the origins of the outbreak. Given how the WHO investigation was co-opted by the Communist Party, this commission could use all information at the federal government’s disposal to investigate Covid-19’s origins and the party’s role, including the possibility that the virus was engineered in a lab doing work for China’s biological-weapons program. Such an inquiry could also explore failures to contain the virus and provide recommendations on averting a future pandemic or worse.

The administration should also reimpose the Obama-era ban on “gain of function” research cooperation between the U.S. and China, which the U.S. previously failed to police. Gain of function involves genetically altering diseases to enhance their virulence, pathogenicity and transferability between species to study how they might potentially evolve in nature. Such research has obvious potential for use in the development of bioweapons.

China must disclose whether its virus research programs abide by the peaceful-purposes clause of the Biological Weapons Convention, to which China has acceded. Absent a credible explanation of events, the Biden administration should begin preparing sanctions against the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their commercial partners for undertaking biological weapons related research and development on behalf of the Chinese military.

To get ahead of the next biological disaster, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration must step up detection and tracking of research efforts centering on diseases with the potential to trigger pandemics. There’s urgent work to do to develop a larger global early-warning system. Just as international networks share data on weather patterns and seismic activity, an international biosensing network could serve as a warning system for natural or man-made disease outbreaks. If China is serious about preserving world health, it could be a founding participant; if not, the network could be used to monitor bio-threats emanating from inside its borders.

Congress should update the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act to impose sanctions on entities that improperly maintain their biological facilities or withhold information about dangerous virological events. The American government should take a full-spectrum approach that directly targets the people, entities and activities involved in China’s biological warfare research and development—including the export of dual-use civilian technologies from the U.S. to China that the Communist Party systematically redirects to malicious military purposes.

Finally, Congress could waive legal sovereign-immunity protections and support legal claims by U.S. citizens against the Chinese Communist Party if it doesn’t provide quick access to hard evidence about the outbreak. Beijing wants chatter about the outbreak—and the coverup—to go away. Letting litigants seek damages from any Chinese citizens or entities implicated in gross negligence will keep the issue alive in the courts and the public eye.

With each passing day we get further from the origins of the pandemic. Now is the time for the U.S. government to get to the bottom of how the virus emerged so that we can prevent future pandemics—and reject the Communist Party’s efforts to distort the facts and control the narrative.

Mr. Asher is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a former State Department staffer. He led the department’s task force investigating the origins of Covid-19 and the role of the Chinese Communist Party.

Appeared in the June 4, 2021, print edition.

Was the Covid pandemic caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China? I think there is a very good chance this is what happened, and the the Chinese government, which is a fucktard dictatorship, is covering up the evidence. "Chinese officials continue to block the world’s ability to get answers about the coronavirus’s origin as the subject remains murky and politically volatile."

New York Times

OPINION

BRET STEPHENS

Media Groupthink and the Lab-Leak Theory

May 31, 2021

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist

If it turns out that the Covid pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China, it will rank among the greatest scientific scandals in history: dangerous research, possibly involving ethically dubious techniques that make viruses more dangerous, carried out in a poorly safeguarded facility, thuggishly covered up by a regime more interested in propaganda than human life, catastrophic for the entire world.

But this possible scandal, which is as yet unproved, obscures an actual scandal, which remains to be digested.

I mean the long refusal by too many media gatekeepers (social as well as mainstream) to take the lab-leak theory seriously. The reasons for this — rank partisanship and credulous reporting — and the methods by which it was enforced — censorship and vilification — are reminders that sometimes the most destructive enemies of science can be those who claim to speak in its name.

Rewind the tape to February of last year, when people such as Senator Tom Cotton began pointing to a disturbing fact set: the odd coincidence of a pandemic originating in the same city where a Chinese lab was conducting high-end experiments on bat viruses; the troubling report that some of the original Covid patients had no contact with the food markets where the pandemic supposedly originated; the fact that the Chinese government lied and stonewalled its way through the crisis. Think what you will about the Arkansas Republican, but these were reasonable observations warranting impartial investigation.

The common reaction in elite liberal circles? A Washington Post reporter called it a “fringe theory” that “has been repeatedly disputed by experts.” The Atlantic Council accused Cotton of abetting an “infodemic” by “pushing debunked claim that the novel coronavirus may have been created in a Wuhan lab.” A writer for Vox said it was a “dangerous conspiracy theory” being advanced by conservatives “known to regularly spew nonsense (and bash China).”

There are many more such examples. But the overall shape of the media narrative was clear. On one side were experts at places like the World Health Organization: knowledgeable, incorruptible, authoritative, noble. On the other were a bunch of right-wing yahoos pushing a risible fantasy with xenophobic overtones in order to deflect attention from the Trump administration’s mishandling of the crisis.

Yet it was also a narrative with holes larger than Donald Trump’s mouth.

Was it outrageous to think that the virus might have escaped the Wuhan Institute? Not if you listened to evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein’s patient, lucid, scientifically rich explanation of the lab-leak hypothesis — which he delivered almost a year ago on the decidedly non-mainstream Joe Rogan podcast.

Was it smart for science reporters to accept the authority of a February 2020 letter, signed by 27 scientists and published in The Lancet, feverishly insisting on the “natural origin” of Covid? Not if those reporters had probed the ties between the letter’s lead author and the Wuhan lab (a fact, as the science writer Nicholas Wade points out in a landmark essay in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that has been public knowledge for months).

Was it wise to suppose that the World Health Organization, which has served as a mouthpiece for Chinese regime propaganda, should be an authority on what counted as Covid “misinformation” by Facebook, which in February banned the lab-leak theory from its platform? Not if the aim of companies like Facebook is to bring the world closer together, as opposed to laundering Chinese government disinformation while modeling its illiberal methods.

To its credit, Facebook reversed itself last week. News organizations are quietly correcting (or stealth editing) last year’s dismissive reports, sometimes using the fig leaf of new information about Wuhan lab workers being infected in the fall of 2019 with a Covid-like illness. And the public-health community is taking a fresh look at its Covid origin story.

But even now one gets a distinct sense of the herd of independent minds hard at work. If the lab-leak theory is finally getting the respectful attention it always deserved, it’s mainly because Joe Biden authorized an inquiry and Anthony Fauci admitted to doubts about the natural-origin claim. In other words, the right president and the right public-health expert have blessed a certain line of inquiry.

Yet the lab-leak theory, whether or not it turns out to be right, was always credible. Even if Tom Cotton believed it. Even if the scientific “consensus” disputed it. Even if bigots — who rarely need a pretext — drew bigoted conclusions from it.

Good journalism, like good science, should follow evidence, not narratives. It should pay as much heed to intelligent gadflies as it does to eminent authorities. And it should never treat honest disagreement as moral heresy.

Anyone wondering why so many people have become so hostile to the pronouncements of public-health officials and science journalists should draw the appropriate conclusion from this story. When lecturing the public about the dangers of misinformation, it’s best not to peddle it yourself.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2021, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Lab-Leak Theory and The Media.

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Fucktard China killed millions of people with their coronavirus mistake. They are still covering up the evidence. China does this to defend their disgusting dictatorship.

        New York Times

BREAKING NEWS

President Biden pushed to investigate the origins of the coronavirus after the White House was told of unexamined intelligence, officials said.

Thursday, May 27, 2021 8:30 PM EST

Intelligence officials have told the White House that computer analysis may shed light on the mystery.

Read the latest

U.S. Is Said to Have Unexamined Intelligence to Pore Over on Virus Origins

Intelligence officials have told the White House that computer analysis may shed light on the mystery.

By Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger

May 27, 2021

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s call for a 90-day sprint to understand the origins of the coronavirus pandemic came after intelligence officials told the White House they had a raft of still-unexamined evidence that required additional computer analysis that might shed light on the mystery, according to senior administration officials.

The officials declined to describe the new evidence. But the revelation that they are hoping to apply an extraordinary amount of computer power to the question of whether the virus accidentally leaked from a Chinese laboratory suggests that the government may not have exhausted its databases of Chinese communications, the movement of lab workers and the pattern of the outbreak of the disease around the city of Wuhan.

In addition to marshaling scientific resources, Mr. Biden’s push is intended to prod American allies and intelligence agencies to mine existing information — like intercepts, witnesses or biological evidence — as well as hunt for new intelligence to determine whether the Chinese government covered up an accidental leak.

Mr. Biden committed on Thursday to making the results of the review public, but added a caveat: “unless there’s something I’m unaware of.”

His call for the study has both domestic and international political ramifications. It prompted his critics to argue that the president had dismissed the possibility that the lab was the origin until the Chinese government this week rejected allowing further investigation by the World Health Organization. And, administration officials said, the White House hopes American allies will contribute more vigorously to a serious exploration of a theory that, until now, they considered at best unlikely, and at worst a conspiracy theory.

So far, the effort to glean evidence from intercepted communications within China, a notoriously hard target to penetrate, has yielded little. Current and former intelligence officials say they strongly doubt anyone will find an email or a text message or a document that shows evidence of a lab accident.

One allied nation passed on information that three workers in the Wuhan virological laboratory were hospitalized with serious flulike symptoms in the autumn of 2019. The information about the sickened workers is considered important, but officials cautioned that it did not constitute evidence that they caught the virus at the laboratory — they may have brought it there.

The White House is hoping that allies and partners can tap their networks of human sources to find additional information about what happened inside the laboratory. While the United States has been rebuilding its own sources in China, it has still not fully recovered from the elimination of its network inside the country a decade ago. As a result, having allies press their informants about what went on inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology will be a key part of the intelligence push ahead.

The inquiry has not reached a dead end, a senior Biden administration official said. Officials would not describe the kind of computational analysis they want to do.

Administration and intelligence officials say it will be as much the work of scientists as spies in trying to unravel how the pandemic was unleashed. The Biden administration has been working to improve its scientific expertise on the National Intelligence Council. Senior officials have told the spy agencies that their science-oriented divisions, which have been working on the issue for months, will play a prominent role in the revitalized inquiry.

The new inquiry will also tap the national labs and other scientific resources of the federal government that previously have not been directly involved in the intelligence effort, the senior administration official said.

Mr. Biden’s announcement that he will require a report from the intelligence community had elements of showmanship. In terms of domestic politics, he is trying to take the initiative on an issue Republicans have long focused on. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has long argued the coronavirus could have emerged accidentally from the Wuhan lab, said Mr. Biden’s order was “better late than never, but far from adequate.”

And on an international front, Mr. Biden called out Chinese recalcitrance to cooperate on investigations both to pressure Beijing to reverse course but also to push allies to focus their own intelligence efforts on examining the theory that the coronavirus might have accidentally leaked from the lab.

Like scientists and the broader public, the intelligence community remains uncertain about the origins of the coronavirus. No definitive intelligence has emerged, and some current and former officials expressed caution that much more can be gathered in 90 days. While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will deliver a report before summer’s end, the inquiry will most likely have to be extended.

On Wednesday, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters he had not seen any conclusive evidence about the cause of the pandemic, but supported the effort to look deeper. “The amount of death, pain and suffering that was experienced in this pandemic is huge,” he said. “We need to know the origin, how this happened.”

The effort to uncover the origins of the coronavirus began more than a year ago, during the Trump administration. But some officials were wary of President Donald J. Trump’s motives, arguing that his interest in the origins of the pandemic was either to deflect blame from his administration’s handling of it or to punish China.

Current officials say the central goal of the new intelligence push is to improve preparations for future pandemics. As a result, Mr. Biden’s message this week was calibrated to leave open the possibility of future cooperation with China.

The White House’s frustration with China has risen after its announcement this week that Beijing would not participate in additional investigations by the World Health Organization. A Biden administration official said if the new inquiry failed to yield an answer, it would be because China had not been transparent.

But the administration is not trying to isolate China, and instead attempting to walk a careful line between pressuring Beijing to cooperate and demonstrating that in its absence, the United States will intensify its own investigation.

Administration officials also believe the new inquiry and Chinese obstruction of the World Health Organization will create the opportunity for stepped-up intelligence cooperation with allies.

Allies have been providing information since the beginning of the pandemic, one official said. But some, including British intelligence services, have been skeptical of the lab leak theory. Others, including Australia, have been more open to it.

As members of the so-called Five Eyes partnership, Britain and Australia already broadly share intelligence with the United States. But the new intelligence review, along with growing frustration with China’s failure to cooperate with the World Health Organization, could prod allies to focus more on the question of the lab leak.

A British official declined to comment. A request for comment from the Australian government was not immediately returned.

In his announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said two intelligence agencies believed the virus most likely occurred naturally, while at least one other favored the theory that it leaked accidentally from a lab in China. None had high confidence in their assessments, the president noted.

In a statement on Thursday, Amanda J. Schoch, the spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the intelligence agencies had come together around the two likely scenarios, but there were so far no high-confidence assessments of the virus’s origins.

“The U.S. intelligence community does not know exactly where, when or how the Covid-19 virus was transmitted initially,” Ms. Schoch said.

While 18 agencies make up the intelligence community, only a handful have been major players in assessing the likely origins of the virus. Most of the broader intelligence community, including the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, believe there is not yet sufficient information to draw a conclusion, even with low confidence, about the origins.

The intelligence community “continues to examine all available evidence, consider different perspectives, and aggressively collect and analyze new information to identify the virus’s origins,” Ms. Schoch said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. @julianbarnes • Facebook

David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent. In a 38-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on May 28, 2021, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Data Remains Unexamined in Inquiry on Virus Origins, Officials Say.

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China doesn't want to cooperate about the coronavirus because the whole thing was their fault. China fucked up the entire planet and killed millions of people. Typical asshole dictatorship.

News Alert May 26, 1:12 p.m. EDT

Biden asks intelligence community to redouble efforts to determine definitive origin of the coronavirus In a statement, President Biden said that in March, he had asked the intelligence community to report on their “most up-to-date analysis” of the origins. He said he received the report this month with no definitive conclusion. Biden also pressed China to cooperate amid questions of whether the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan. Read more

China might be lying about the coronavirus. China is a dictatorship, so of course they are dishonest about everything that makes them look bad.

Important developments in the pandemic.

By Ben Guarino with Lindsey Bever  Email The Post's coronavirus coverage linked in this newsletter is free to access from this email.   The latest Renewed interest in the origin of the coronavirus pandemic has once again placed the Chinese city of Wuhan in the spotlight. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra urged the World Health Organization on Tuesday to undertake another investigation into the early days of the outbreak, though he did so without naming China. And while many researchers who study animal-borne viruses say natural exposure is more likely, it has not been ruled out that the virus may have accidentally been released from a laboratory. This a fine line to follow: It's too early to dismiss the lab hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. But that doesn't mean the media's skeptical, early coverage was wrong. As reporter Aaron Blake notes, when Donald Trump claimed to be confident that the virus came from a lab, the president never offered evidence to back those claims up. Infectious-disease experts such as Anthony S. Fauci recently called for further examination. This timeline, from The Post's Fact Checker, highlights some of the key developments so far in the attempt to find this virus's origin. These kinds of investigations aren't simple — it took more than a dozen years to discover the natural source, in bats, of the first SARS virus. Meanwhile, investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are studying a handful of cases of heart muscle inflammation in young people after vaccination. These events have not been affirmatively connected to injections. A CDC spokesman said that the cases “appear to be mild and often go away without requiring treatment.” Vaccine maker Moderna will seek authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to allow teenagers 12 to 17 to get the shots. Clinical trial data show that the vaccine reached 93 percent efficacy after the first dose. And teens had similar levels of antibodies as adults. The Biden administration is planning to allow more federal employees to continue working from home post-pandemic, if their job permits. “We anticipate this guidance will leave room for decision-making at departments and agencies, to provide maximum flexibility for defining work requirements to meet mission and workforce needs,” a senior administration official told The Post. An update from the administration explaining the policy is expected in June. Other important news Scenes from inside D.C. restaurants show the anticipation and nerves of the first night back at full capacity. Patients in India need care so desperately they're seeking help over the Internet from U.S. doctors, such as this intensive care physician in Missouri. Bystanders fearful of the coronavirus stopped giving CPR last year. But D.C. fire officials want to assure people the odds of saving a life through CPR are vastly higher than the odds of catching the virus. Here's what 10 high school valedictorians had to say about graduating at the top of the class in a pandemic.