U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), an investigative public health nonprofit group, has filed a lawsuit¹ against the National Institutes of Health after the agency failed to respond to the USRTK’s July 10, 2020, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. According to the NIH, records were withheld due to them being part of an ongoing legal investigation.

The USRTK’s lawsuit seeks access to nonexempt records of gain-of-function experiments relating to the COVID-19 pandemic from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the EcoHealth Alliance, which partnered with and funded the Wuhan Institute.²According to the USRTK’s November 5, 2020 press release:³

“Today’s litigation against the NIH is one part of our efforts to try to uncover what is known about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and the risks of biosafety labs and gain-of-function research, which seeks to augment the infectivity or lethality of potential pandemic pathogens. Since July, we have filed 36 state, federal and international public records requests about these subjects.”

Flawed Studies Form Base of Zoonotic Theory

USRTK is also concerned about new claims that PLOS Pathogens and Nature published key papers on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 despite being flawed. I discussed these disturbing findings in “Top Medical Journal Caught in Massive Cover-Up.” It appears data sets were changed without notices of correction being published.

November 9, 2020, USRTK published a series of emails⁴ they’d sent to the lead authors and editors of the papers in dispute. The questions raised⁵ by the responses they received “put in doubt the validity of these key studies,” USRTK writes. As noted by USRTK reporter Carey Gillam:⁶

“Chinese governmental authorities first promoted the idea that the source of the causal agent for COVID-19 in humans came from a wild animal in December. Chinese government-supported scientists then backed that theory in four separate studies submitted to the journals between February 7 and 18 …

The four papers in question are Liu et al.,⁷ Xiao et al.,⁸ Lam et al.⁹ and Zhang et al.¹⁰ The two that are currently being investigated by the journal editors are Liu et al and Xiao et al. In communications with the authors and journal editors of those two papers, USRTK has learned of serious problems with the publication of those studies, including the following: 

• Liu et al. did not publish or share (upon being asked) raw and/or missing data that would allow experts to independently verify their genomic analyses.

• Editors at both Nature and PLoS Pathogens, as well as Professor Stanley Perlman, the editor of Liu et al., have acknowledged in email communications that they are aware of serious issues with these papers and that the journals are investigating them. Yet, they have made no public disclosure of the potential problems with the papers.

… The problems with the research papers raise ‘serious questions and concerns’ about the validity of the zoonotic theory overall, according to Dr. Sainath Suryanarayanan, a biologist and sociologist of science, and USRTK staff scientist.”

Why We Need to Know the Origin of SARS-CoV-2

In a November 3, 2020, PNAS opinion,¹¹ Dr. David Relman — a microbiologist and professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at Stanford¹² — explains why it’s so important to identify the origin of SARS-CoV-2:  

“SARS-CoV-2 is a betacoronavirus whose apparent closest relatives, RaTG13 and RmYN02, are reported to have been collected from bats in 2013 and 2019, respectively, in Yunnan Province, China. COVID-19 was first reported in December 2019 more than 1,000 miles away in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China. 

Beyond these facts, the ‘origin story’ is missing many key details, including a plausible and suitably detailed recent evolutionary history of the virus, the identity and provenance of its most recent ancestors, and surprisingly, the place, time, and mechanism of transmission of the first human infection. 

Even though a definitive answer may not be forthcoming, and even though an objective analysis requires addressing some uncomfortable possibilities, it is crucial that we pursue this question. Preventing the next pandemic depends on understanding the origins of this one …

If we find more concrete evidence of a ‘spill-over’ event with SARS-CoV-2 passing directly from bat to human, then efforts to understand and manage the bat-human interface need to be significantly strengthened. But if SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab to cause the pandemic, it will become critical to understand the chain of events and prevent this from happening again.”

Relman goes on to review the top three contending origin hypotheses:

• The virus evolved in bats and then spread directly or via an intermediate host to humans through natural mechanisms 
• SARS-CoV-2, or a recent ancestor, was collected from an infected animal and then either knowingly or accidentally propagated or genetically manipulated before accidental release 
• SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately engineered through gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, and was intentionally released 

 

As noted by Relman, we’ve thus far been unable to identify the immediate parent or parents of SARS-CoV-2, and this is a key piece of information needed to unlock the full puzzle. The two closest relatives — RaTG13 and RmYN02 — aren’t close enough to have mutated into SARS-CoV-2.  

It’s quite possible that there is more than one ancestral lineage. Recombination between different viruses is common both in nature and in laboratory research, and to determine which route the virus took, we need to identify the starting point. Relman’s opinion ends with the following comment:¹³

“A more complete understanding of the origins of COVID-19 clearly serves the interests of every person in every country on this planet. It will limit further recriminations and diminish the likelihood of conflict; it will lead to more effective responses to this pandemic, as well as efforts to anticipate and prevent the next one. 

It will also advance our discussions about risky science. And it will do something else: Delineating COVID-19’s origin story will help elucidate the nature of our very precarious coexistence within the biosphere.”

Unfortunately, evidence suggests data scrubbing and cover-ups have already occurred, which makes establishing SARS-CoV-2’s origin all the more difficult. The question is, why was this done? 

Was there a political purpose behind it? Was this a purposely engineered virus released to provide justification for the globalist “reset” plan? Was it an accidental release that was covered up to protect the future existence of dangerous gain-of-function research? 

Indeed, pinpointing the virus’ origin is key to answering these important questions, and no one but the ones responsible for the attempted cover-up have anything to gain from shielding the public from the truth, whatever it might be.