TLDR is that this guy was acting as a fundraiser for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where they were specifically making novel coronaviruses, e.g. by creating chimeric viruses of SARS and MERS, and then using those viruses for gain of function research, e.g. by infecting humanized lung tissue in mice.
He is the president of EcoHealth Alliance who was helping fund research into corona viruses and gain of function in Wuhan. He also was involved with the WHO investigation on the lab leak hypothesis despite his conflict of interest and basically denied it could have come from the lab.
All indicators point to a lab leak. The project was called DEFUSE, proposed in 2018, it was led by Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance and funded by the NIH.
https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/main-doc...
These things are known now, after being long denied by those involved.
And it is a conspiracy theory. You need the CCP, Trump, Biden, Facci, dozens of labs staff, and any decent virologist or geneticist to all work together to hide it.
Come on, get real, stop pretending.
Even setting aside that china is a place where scientists who speak out are regularly harassed consider this:. Suppose you set out to save millions of lives and instead wound up saving negative millions of lives. Can you say with certainty that you would have the fortitude to admit your complicity in the mistake?
But please, tell me how that conclusively proves a lab leak?
Come on. You can believe it, that's up to you. But don't pretend there is any evidence.
If you look at the defuse project proposal, however, you'll see a proposal that a reasonable person would conclude had a high risk of creating SARS-CoV2.
They proposed to take a bad corona virus and attempt to grow versions that infected humans by growing it in humanized mice. If that failed, they proposed to genetically modify it to insert a furin cleavage site. After getting their humanized virus they intended to expose immune boosted wild bats to it to inoculate them to this 'predicted' virus.
The biggest discrepancy is that SARS-CoV2's closest known ancestor isn't the virus they were proposing to study: instead, the nearest ancestor is the virus the lab was working on immediately prior to the defuse proposal. And CoV2's most conspicious difference from the wild type ancestor is the furin cleavage whos sequence is very distant from the virus and would not likely be produced easily through mutation yet happens to be identical to a sequence in the literature prior to the research.
Even if we had absolutely concrete proof that SARS-CoV2's origin was completely natural since the research proposals obviously could have created it there ought to be serious inquiry and policy review-- because if it wasn't man made it seems like it would only be by good luck. We have been playing with fire.