The most recent episode of the 80k podcast had Andy Weber on it. He was the US Assistant Secretary of Defense, “responsible for biological and other weapons of mass destruction”.
Well, over time, evidence for natural spread hasn’t been produced, we haven’t found the intermediate species, you know, the pangolin that was talked about last year. I actually think that the odds that this was a laboratory-acquired infection that spread perhaps unwittingly into the community in Wuhan is about a 50% possibility… And we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing exactly this type of research [gain of function research]. Some of it — which was funded by the NIH for the United States — on bat Coronaviruses. So it is possible that in doing this research, one of the workers at that laboratory got sick and went home. And now that we know about asymptomatic spread, perhaps they didn’t even have symptoms and spread it to a neighbor or a storekeeper. So while it seemed an unlikely hypothesis a year ago, over time, more and more evidence leaning in that direction has come out. And it’s wrong to dismiss that as kind of a baseless conspiracy theory. I mean, very, very serious scientists like David Relman from Stanford think we need to take the possibility of a laboratory accident seriously.
The included link is to a statement from the US Embassy in Georgia, which to me seems surprisingly blunt, calling out the CCP for obfuscation, and documenting events at the WIV, going so far as to speculate that they were doing bio-weapons research there.
The most recent episode of the 80k podcast had Andy Weber on it. He was the US Assistant Secretary of Defense, “responsible for biological and other weapons of mass destruction”.
Towards the end of the episode he casually drops quite the bomb:
The included link is to a statement from the US Embassy in Georgia, which to me seems surprisingly blunt, calling out the CCP for obfuscation, and documenting events at the WIV, going so far as to speculate that they were doing bio-weapons research there.