COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab — ProPublica

…many large-scale cases of domestic and foreign safety incidents in recent years, and from the perspective of shouldering responsibility, standardizing operations, emergency planning, and inspecting hidden dangers one-by-one, [he] laid out a deep analysis, with many layers and taken from many angles, which vividly revealed the complex and grave situation currently facing [bio]security work… 

 China "didn't have the background of how to run [advanced laboratories] safely," says James LeDuc. "They were trying to do their best."…

 …By contrast, the interim Senate report concludes that "the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt, or the presumption of accuracy." 

The available evidence doesn't fit the patterns of previous outbreaks, it states, including outbreaks of SARS in 2003 and avian influenza in 2013. Those outbreaks saw many independent spillover events in multiple locations, and those viruses "exhibited much greater genetic diversity than early SARS-CoV-2 strains." And within six months of the first known case of SARS, the report says, Chinese health officials found evidence of the virus in palm civets and raccoon dogs. 

 The interim report also points out that, "almost three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, there is still no evidence of an animal infected with SARS-CoV-2, or a closely related virus, before the first publicly reported human COVID-19 cases in Wuhan in December 2019." 

 Worobey said, "Our two recent papers establish that a natural zoonotic origin is the only plausible scenario for the origin of the pandemic."… 

 While the China CDC found no evidence of the virus in animals in the market, Pekar told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that the removal of animals from the market by the start of 2020 made it difficult to "actually sample the correct animals for SARS-CoV-2." 

 The Senate's interim report is no likelier than the Worobey and Pekar studies to close the book on the origins debate, nor does it attempt to. If anything, it seems destined to escalate the battle just as Republicans in Congress hope to retake the majority in the midterm elections. They aim to haul Dr. Anthony Fauci, the outgoing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, into Benghazi-style hearings.

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab