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Vaccine Disinformation Moves To Congress

 “War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
―George Orwell, in 1984

“Anecdote is science.”

That silly notion can now be added to the Orwellian Newspeak Catechism thanks to those who prefer confirmation bias over empirical data to determine their “alternative facts.” This seems to include several  members of Congress.

The war on objective science recently spilled over to Congress where a group of anti-vaccine Congressmen and women and one Senator held an impromptu meeting to confirm their disinformation about so-called injuries caused by the COVID mRNA vaccines (note: the technology just won the Nobel Prize for Medicine). This was not a meeting called by a regular committee but an ad hoc gathering of some committed anti-vaccine rogues. It was held in a tiny back room in the Capitol and was poorly attended, poorly staffed, poorly equipped, and, thankfully, poorly publicized. It was described as a meeting of the “shadow Congress;” accurately named as it dabbled in the penumbra of truth.

Leading this November 13 meeting was Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia). Greene, no stranger to fantasy, has previously claimed that Jewish space lasers caused recent wildfires in California, that the shootings in Parkland, Sandy Hook and Las Vegas were staged, and that 9/11 was an inside job. Because of these and other extremist reflections, the House sensibly stripped Greene of several committee assignments.

Others on the “committee” included Congressmen Clay Higgins (R, Louisiana), Thomas Massie (R, Kentucky), Warren Davidson (R, Ohio), and Andy Biggs (R, Arizona). Also attending was Senator Ron Johnson (R) from my own State of Wisconsin who has been a vaccine dissembler for a while, claiming, for instance, that the vaccines have killed many people. I recently contacted the Senator’s office and asked why he believed that. They quickly responded and sent me to a web site that was very professional looking and had very many graphs and tables claiming to show that the vaccines caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. The problem is that the data they used to put said graphs and tables together were bogus. The statistics were fraudulent (for example to test the site, an MD submitted a claim saying that the vax turned him into the Incredible Hulk. His claim was accepted!). Anti-vaccine crusaders with radio and blog platforms have urged their audiences to post false information on the site, and the website itself had been debunked numerous times by the investigative press and in science journals for incorrectly reporting the data. I pointed this out to Sen. Johnson’s office and never heard back, in contrast to their earlier quick response. Go figure.

Back to the Shadow Congress Committee meeting: Three people testified: A lawyer, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and a scientist. A summary of the testimony of each, with my comments follows.  

The lawyer. Forty-six-year-old Thomas Renz, went first. He passed the Ohio bar exam in 2019 after five tries and since has made a name for himself, along with the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell and others, as a COVID conspiracy buff. Renz made three unsupported claims enumerated below: 

1. First, Renz declared without any evidence, that it is vaccinated people who are dying. However, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that in 2021, unvaccinated adults were 12 times more likely to be hospitalized and in 2022, that they were 6 times more likely to die after infection. Science shows that COVID vaccines have been estimated to have saved the lives of more than 3 million Americans. Renz’s says otherwise. Who are you going to believe, science or the lawyer, Renz?
2. The lawyer also claimed, again without proof (a lawyer without evidence?), that “COVID is not as bad as SARS or MERS but about as dangerous as a bad flu season.” Well. The first human coronavirus outbreak, SARS-1, was identified in Asia in February 2003. It infected a tad more than 8,000 people, killing ~800. By July 2003, the outbreak was contained without a vaccine. The second coronavirus outbreak, called MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), appeared in June 2012, in Saudi Arabia. That virus infected >2,500 people, killed about 900 and also was contained in a short while without a vaccine. Compare those numbers to SARS-CoV-2, which so far has killed almost 2 million people in the United States and 7 million people in the world. And four years later it continues; it is not contained even though we have several vaccines. Except for the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more than 50 million people worldwide (that was before flu vaccines) COVID is worse than any other flu in history and much worse than SARS or MERS. Renz’s lawyerly opinion is bunk. Why is he even testifying on a medical matter?
3. Renz saved the best for last. With the help of an “unnamed whistleblower,” Renz claimed, without proof, of course, that "something suspicious" happened in November 2014 at Fort Riley, Kansas, when the Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA, in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, created SARS-CoV-2 virus. Not in the Wuhan lab mind you, but in Kansas in 2014! To support his claim, Renz offered nothing! It was just his opinion. Renz also asserted that Tony Fauci, the CDC, FDA, and the DOD played a part in a massive cover-up of all this (so how in the world does HE know?). He unbelievably stated that Hunter Biden was also involved (why not?). Funny how the FBI hasn’t picked up on any of that. Renz knows because he says he does. Trust him, he’s a lawyer without evidence. But that is good enough for the Shadow Congress.
   

The Ob/Gyn. Next up was Kimberly Biss, MD, a well credentialed obstetrician and gynecologist practicing in Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Florida, which makes her testimony all-the-more-difficult to understand.

She claimed that after receiving COVID vaccines, an unspecified number of women in her practice suffered unsubstantiated menstrual cycle irregularities including severe, persistent bleeding. However, the only way to reliably determine whether COVID vaccines caused these  changes in menstruation is to compare the symptoms in women who got the vaccine to women who did not. She didn’t do this. Anecdotal observations like these offered by Biss usually don’t include both groups, which is why medical science considers anecdotes to be unreliable and instead rely on controlled clinical trials to base medical science opinions.

Furthermore, real scientific comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated women have been done but these were not entered into evidence at the Shadow Congress Hearing. A study of more than 1,100 women performed by the Boston School of Public Health found that there was no association between COVID-19 vaccination and cycle irregularity, bleed length, heaviness of bleed, or menstrual pain. So, which is more credible, Biss’s personal uncontrolled anecdote on an unknown number of patients whose medical history is unknown vs a controlled scientific study on over 1000 patients with carefully documented medical histories and compared to a comparable cohort of unvaccinated menstruating women?  

Biss further testified that in her practice miscarriage rates went up in vaccinated women, again without indicating the number of patients she saw and without providing any medical documentation. She again failed to note the miscarriage rates in unvaccinated women (why does she always leave out the data from unvaxed women?). Another scientific study of 40,000 pregnant women showed that vaccination was not at all associated with an increased risk of premature births. And other controlled studies have shown that COVID vaccination during pregnancy does not increase the risk of birth defects. Again, what would you believe, Biss’s anecdotes or several well controlled peer-reviewed and published science studies?

Biss continued her misleading anecdotal testimony by claiming that it was unsafe for vaccinated women to breastfeed because she "heard" it caused myocarditis in babies in Scotland. She failed to provide any substantiation for her wild claim that no one else seems to have heard. Not only has breastfeeding proven to be safe in women who have received COVID vaccines, newborn infants benefit from vaccine-induced antibodies in breast milk. This provides newborns with their initial protection against COVID as they develop their own immune system. That is a normal part of the maternal-fetal immune system that newborns immensely benefit from. That is basic immunology.  

Finally, and most outrageous was Biss’s stance on vaccinating children. She advised against vaccinating kids falsely claiming that only “three in one million children will die from COVID.” One wonders where she gets her facts like this and like those about myocarditis in breast fed babies in Scotland. As of January 2023, COVID was the leading cause of infectious disease deaths in children. Contrary to Biss’s claims, the COVID death rate for children less than one year of age was 43 per million. Hundreds of young children have died from COVID and many, many more have been hospitalized long term with the very serious condition called multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS, which I have written about in these pages. COVID is much more serious than the flu for kids. None of those deaths or serious illnesses in kids are acceptable. Her claims to the contrary are simply irresponsible for a physician to make.

Finally, the scientist. Perhaps the silliest testimony in front of MTG’s “shadow” committee came from a scientist and physician named Robert Malone who recently has gone around claiming he “invented” the mRNA vaccine. He did not. In the late 1980s and early 90s, labs around the world were fixated with the idea of trying to express genes in cells via transferring DNA into cell cultures. The technique was called “transfection.” It promised to be a powerful tool for studying the function of genes in cells, but proved enormously difficult as I wrote about earlier. My own lab considered trying it, but discarded the idea in favor of another approach, viral-based gene transfer, which we often used to study gene function, and which some might call routine gain-of-function research as I also described earlier in these pages.

Meanwhile, Malone was a small part of the “transfection” bandwagon and in the late 80s published two papers showing it was possible to transfect fragile mRNA protected by a lipid micro-bubble into cells (most labs transfected DNA, which was easier to work with than mRNA). Undoubtedly, his research represented a stepping stone on the path to developing the vaccines, but he had no role in vaccine development. He was one of very many scientists who contributed incremental advances that ultimately made the vaccines possible. He is now way overselling his role. The technology that produced the mRNA COVID vaccines recently won a Nobel Prize and Malone was never mentioned in the invention. He is only a giant in his own mind.

More to the point, Malone testified that the vaccines are contaminated with fragments of DNA and dangerous. He argued, without evidence and contrary to all other science, that these DNA fragments alter cellular DNA of vaccine recipients, causing cancers, autoimmune diseases, and a variety of other disorders. For pregnant women, Malone further opined, again without a shred of proof and contrary to common science, that these DNA fragments could cross the placenta and cause birth defects. Furthermore, according to Malone, the FDA, the CIA, and other government agencies know about this DNA contamination but are covering it up (is Hunter involved in this too??). Again, he offered no evidence at all for this allegation. But, maybe we can excuse him, because there is no evidence to offer.

The idea that the vaccines are contaminated with DNA detritus is old news. All vaccines contain DNA of different sorts, which has never caused any harm as long as vaccines have been given. In fact it is biologically impossible that miniscule amounts of DNA detritus could mess up our cellular DNA. It is irresponsible, and scientifically ignorant of Malone to simply throw this out without elaborating. He didn’t elaborate because to do so would have ruined his “Frankenscience” innuendo that seemed to duly impress the scientifically naïve Shadow Congressional audience he spoke to.

The mRNA used in the vaccine is produced from a DNA strand. The DNA strand is then digested with an enzyme called DNase which chews up all DNA strands, leaving only the DNA building blocks, or remnants of it behind; DNA detritus. It is like taking a large building and demolishing it into its bricks. The large mRNA molecules are then easily biochemically separated from most of the DNA detritus. Even if there were miniscule traces of DNA detritus left over, it is biologically impossible for it to damage cellular DNA. It simply is recycled and reused by our cells. Our cells do that all the time.

But, maybe larger, intact DNA fragments could mess up our cellular DNA? We are exposed to large fragments of DNA all the time with no adverse effects. Consider the following two points: 1) we eat foreign DNA from plants and animals all the time and that DNA enters our blood stream in intact pieces much larger than the digested detritus we have been talking about. Yet, we are totally unaffected by this. 2) We also get vaccinated with whole DNA virus vaccines and have no concern that they affect our cellular DNA. Studies have shown that there is NO genotoxic effect of any of the vaccines.

Finally, consider the inherent conflict in Malone’s position. On the one hand he goes around promoting himself as the inventor of the vaccine technology. He even laments that he has not been given his due credit for the invention. Then he tries to discredit the same invention as something very dangerous and that should not be given to people because it causes enormous harm.

Which is it? Do we laud Malone as he would like for discovering a lifesaving vaccine, or pillory him for creating the dangerous vaccine he says it is? The man is as confused as his testimony.

This is what some of our Congress people spent their time doing last November. The Congressional Flake Caucus wasting their time and our money on a "hearing" without a single reputable testimony. At least it received the very little attention it deserved.

Last word. In an earlier post in these pages I asked the question if it was criminal to intentionally mislead people about lifesaving vaccines. That question is worth raising again, now.

Part 2: Gain-Of-Function Research At The Wuhan Lab—What Exactly Was The Wuhan Lab Doing With Coronaviruses?

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good; Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”  —The Animals

In the first part of this two-part blog series, I described what gain-of-function research entails in order to set the stage for this blog post which describes the coronavirus research that went on in the Wuhan labs. So, was it dangerous and risky? Did it likely lead to the release of SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID? Let me try to clarify all that now.

Coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab: After the first SARS epidemic in China in 2002, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had established itself as a world class coronavirus research lab. It was from their diligent work that the world learned that the first SARS virus came from a horseshoe bat via other animals such as civets and raccoon dogs. That was the result of years of arduous research trudging through bat guano muck in hundreds of caves throughout China to collect samples from thousands of bats. They reported their finding 14 years after SARS appeared and shortly after another strange, lethal flu popped up in the Middle East that was soon attributed to yet another bat-borne coronavirus that came via camel intermediate hosts—MERS.

Before these two coronaviruses that jumped from animals to cause significant disease in humans, the viruses were only known to cause mild human maladies; basically, the common cold. Therefore, when it was learned that the deadly SARS and MERS diseases were caused by coronaviruses, it rattled the cages of health experts around the world. This was brand new!

Hence, even before COVID struck, bat-born coronaviruses were hot on the radars of infectious disease nerds and public health worrywarts. The WIV, as one of the world’s preeminent labs for identifying novel coronaviruses was given international funds to continue their efforts to identify and catalog bat coronaviruses. As they did years earlier when they identified the origin of the SARS virus in horseshoe bats, WIV scientists traveled to far-flung Chinese caves to collect bat guano and biological samples (blood, saliva, fecal) from captured bats. The samples were brought back to the lab in Wuhan for analysis.

Since it is exceedingly difficult and potentially very dangerous to grow wild viruses from such samples (failure is the norm even when many viruses are present in the samples) the lab resorted to their previous tried and true methods of searching the samples for viral genome sequences. They found a LOT of new ones!

Their first and primary order of business in this research was the very mundane task to sequence and catalog all the different coronaviruses they found. They then colligated these genomes into trees of different virus families and posted all the data in a vast database for world scientists to use. They were coronavirus genealogists.

The database is an enormously useful research tool for scientists around the world studying the origins and evolution of coronaviruses in animals and humans. (Coronaviruses also cause significant animal disease, so they also are of great agricultural interest around the world.)

The Wuhan lab also was charged with predicting which of the new virus sequences they found might pose future health threats to humans.

This is where all the controversy begins.

Remember that the Wuhan scientists actually did not have these viruses on hand, just their genome sequences. So, without the actual virus, how could they evaluate the ability of new coronaviruses to infect humans? To do this WIV scientist, Zhengli Shi, used a genetic engineering technique first published in 2015 by Univ. of North Carolina Scientist Ralph Baric to study coronaviruses from their genome sequences (she was a collaborator on Baric’s 2015 paper, so was quite familiar with the approach). It was a technique that also was in use at the time by several labs around the world. It is notable that NIH funded this coronavirus research conducted by Baric at UNC well before COVID appeared and didn’t consider it to be GoF research then.

Using Baric’s genetic engineering technique, Shi’s lab at the WIV used as a tool, a benign coronavirus that they could grow in the lab that was only distantly related to the first SARS virus, but was not known to cause human disease. Its genome sequence was not at all related to SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID, and which had not yet appeared.

Shi’s lab removed the spike protein gene sequence from the genome of this benign lab virus tool and methodically replaced it with spike protein sequences from each new virus they sequenced. They then grew the lab virus tool carrying the new spike protein and tested its ability to infect human cells in tissue culture.

It is the spike protein that determines whether a coronavirus can infect human cells. Therefore, if the chimeric lab virus carrying the new spike gene infected human cells, it would indicate that the virus the spike protein sequence came from was a likely human pathogen and that virus sequence was then listed on the database as a potential human risk. However, if the chimeric test virus failed to infect the human tissue culture cells, that meant that the spike protein from the new virus genome would not support infection of human cells and the new virus sequence was not categorized as a concern for human infection.

This is how newly identified coronavirus sequences were categorized as potential human health threats without ever having to grow or isolate each virus itself.

In other words, this test simply expressed the spike protein of each novel coronavirus on the backbone of the safe lab virus genome in order to see if it could infect human cells. This completely negated the need to grow and handle the potentially much more dangerous wild-type virus.

It is important to notice that this strategy eliminated all risk of a lab leak of any dangerous virus since it was not necessary to grow or handle potentially dangerous wild-type viruses using this technique.

Is this gain-of-function-research? Strictly speaking, no. Remember, this sort of coronavirus engineering research had been done years earlier in Baric’s UNC lab, and was being done in other labs around the world, and it was never regarded as GoF research then by NIH.

NIH considers GoF research on pathogens to be research that either: 1) increases the pathogenicity of a microbe (that is, makes its disease worse), 2) improves its transmissibility or its ability to infect hosts, or 3) alters the host range of a pathogen. Therefore, in the WIV experiments to assess the ability of novel virus genome sequences to infect human cells, the chimeric test viruses that simply expressed new spike proteins on a laboratory virus backbone either retained the ability of the original lab virus to infect human cells, or they lost the ability to infect human cells.

Therefore, the chimeric viruses gained no new function that was tested. They either retained or lost the ability to infect human cells. The experiments were not at all designed to give the test virus any new functions. Furthermore, these experiments could not have led to the development of SARS-CoV-2 that caused the COVID pandemic, even by accident, since the laboratory test virus used to create the chimeric viruses in the experiments was not at all related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

There is a devil in the details: But. Notice that one of the the NIH definitions of GoF research is research that alters a pathogen’s host range. For example, take a flu virus that only passes between birds; avian flu. If you make changes in its genome so that the birds can also pass it to humans that mutation alters its host range and is a GoF change.

In the WIV lab, viruses with new spike protein gene sequences were only tested for their ability to infect human cells in a petri dish. The ability of these chimeric viruses with new spike proteins to also infect other animals was not tested. Theoretically, the chimeric test viruses could feasibly also infect, say a water buffalo, or a wart hog, or some other animal that the original lab virus might not have been able to. That would be a technical gain-of-function. But, that begs the question; in such an experiment, how would you know whether or not the host range of the chimeric virus had changed until you possibly had tested its ability to infect every known animal? A logistical impossibility.

Therefore, based on this theoretical point, it cannot be definitely stated that the experiments were not GoF experiments. In fact, chances are pretty good that some of the novel spike protein sequences attached to the lab test virus in fact altered its host range and, thus, the experiments would technically be GoF research.

Bottom line: Technically speaking, therefore, these experiments carried out at the WIV probably could be called GoF experiments. By a lawyer. Not by a scientist. That picks the proverbial nit and splits a very fine frog hair, to mix metaphors. The same research had been done ten years earlier in Ralph Baric’s UNC lab and was not considered GoF then. What is important is that the research at the UNC or the WIV never set out to create viruses with enhanced virulence, transmissibility, or altered host range. That was never the intent. The aim of the WIV research was solely to predict the human risk posed by novel coronaviruses without actually having to directly work with the potentially dangerous pathogens. Actually working with the dangerous viruses would have posed a very real risk.

Bottom, bottom line: The research conducted at the WIV was the most safe and responsible way to identify new coronaviruses that could potentially pose future human health risks. It is to the detriment of human health that this research has come under heavy criticism and that such future research has been hampered by criticism from people who fail to understand what the research is about and have, therefore, demonized it and want to prevent it.

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Gain-Of-Function Research At The Wuhan Lab: Part 1

“Mater artium necessitas"

 A lot of news print, band width, and fevered comment has been bandied about regarding “Gain-of-Function” (GoF) coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). It usually has been done so with an unspoken insinuation that something was very wrong or careless with that research. People are left with visions that GoF research involves mad scientists creating Franken-viruses and that that perhaps caused the pandemic. Certainly when scientists begin fiddling around with the genomes of nasty pathogens bad things can possibly happen. In fact, bad things can occur simply by growing and culturing dangerous microbes—accidents can happen.

Did we in fact get the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which caused COVID, from scientists in Wuhan playing Russian (or Chinese) roulette with coronaviruses and their genes? Did irresponsible or careless research lead to an intentional, or, more likely, an accidental event that unleashed a virus that devastated the world for two-plus years?

These questions and rumors have floated around long enough that people now believe the premise--say it often enough and people will believe. But, hardly anyone knows what research was being done in the WIV labs. Few people even know what GoF research entails because no one has taken the time to describe it.

Let me give a shot at clarifying all this. I will do this in a two-part blog. The first blog post, which you are now reading, will explain what gain-of-function research is. It will surprise readers to learn that humans have been doing it for thousands of years and that it is going on all around us all the time. In the second blog that I will post in a few days, I will delve into what exactly was going on in the Wuhan labs and try to explain the research so non-scientists can grasp what they were doing.

My aim in these two blog posts is to give readers the ability to parse through the rhetoric and understand the reality. Here we go.

GoF research backstory: Basically, gain-of-function simply is when a mutation in an organism--animal, plant, or microbe--changes some function in it. That is what drives evolution, That is how bacteria acquire resistance to antibiotics, as an example. Microbes and cells do it all on their own via happenstance mutation followed by natural selection in an environment that favors the mutation.

Humans have been purposefully doing GoF research ever since we began farming and raising animals. We just never called it gain-of-function research. The minute we began selectively breeding animals and crops to produce better products, we were doing GoF research. Selective breeding first identifies animals or crops with desired traits that arose by chance genetic mutation and then selectively chooses the animals with those traits to breed. That fixes the genetic mutation and its desired trait into the genome of the plant or animal. Gain-of-function.

Then came recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s. We began cloning and mutating genes in the lab, and  inserting the lab-altered genes into animals and plants, thereby speeding up the long, arduous process of selective breeding. We do this all the time now in making genetically engineered crops and animals. It also is how we are now beginning to genetically treat certain diseases in plants, animals and humans. This is all gain-of-function technology. It is happening all around us all the time.

GoF technology also is a very common research tool used in almost every cell biology and microbiology lab in the world. For example, at one point in my own research lab, we studied how a change in a normal human gene might cause what was an untreatable leukemia. We took a cloned version of the normal human gene, mutated it, then put it in a virus to shuttle the mutated gene into bone marrow cells growing in tissue culture. The gene we altered caused normal bone marrow cells to become leukemia. That is how we proved the alteration in the normal human gene was sufficient to cause leukemia. From all the research that followed in many labs using that GoF leukemia model, the leukemia is now mostly curable. That illustrates the value of GoF lab research. It is done all the time in countless labs around the world to understand how genes and cells work.

What about GoF research on dangerous pathogens? Just like in the cell biology experiments above, GoF experiments on pathogens can tell us how certain viruses and bacteria become dangerous. As just one example, in the early 2000s, flu researchers at the University of Wisconsin did experiments to learn what made the 1918 Spanish flu so much more devastating than other seasonal flus. They systematically replaced genes from a mundane cloned laboratory flu strain with genes from the 1918 strain that had been cloned from stored patient samples dating from 1918. The goal was to learn which of the 1918 flu genes increased the transmission and/or virulence of the lab strain. Gain-of-function.

Bottom line: Similar GoF studies are undertaken all the time in many labs around the world that work with many other dangerous pathogens. Information from such studies has been enormously valuable for understanding how dangerous pathogens become dangerous and cause disease, and how to protect us from them. These studies have been conducted without causing major problems for the world.

Sure, GoF research can be used for nefarious purposes. A malevolent actor can use it to make terrible pathogens like anthrax resistant to all antibiotics and turn it into a weapon. It would be simple to do; a college microbiology student in a college lab could do it if he got his hands on the bacteria (which can be easily grown from soil). Ebola is a terribly lethal virus, but it is very difficult to transfer between people,  which has limited it to controllable regional epidemics. If a mad scientist manipulated its genome to turn it into an airborne pathogen, it could wreak world-wide havoc, probably worse than COVID or the Spanish flu. And so on.

Therefore GoF research on pathogens can be both beneficial and dangerous. This is called “dual purpose research.” Scientists and government officials are very aware of this dual threat from such research and sometimes science publications purposefully withhold critical data that a bad actor could misuse.

Needless to say, this is a very controversial tightrope science walks when dealing with dual purpose science, such as GoF research on dangerous pathogens. Science is entirely based on disclosing what it discovers, but it can sometimes discover things that, while enormously useful for humans and the world, can also be enormously destructive. What do you do then?

Have you seen the movie, Oppenheimer?

Now that we have established grounding in what gain-of-function research entails, the next blog post, will describe the coronavirus research that went on in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Hopefully, these blogs will give you a clearer understanding of whether or not the lab was responsible for the virus that caused the COVID pandemic.