You are not a bat. Seriously, y'all. Stop it.

Accountability?

On May 1, 2024, Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance will be testifying at a public hearing during which he will be questioned on discrepancies in his previous closed-door testimony to a House Committee, relating to the origins of COVID-19, gain-of-function research, and his connection with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance is a U.S.-based non-profit, publicly funded organization whose mission is ostensibly to prevent pandemics from occurring. Despite growing evidence to the contrary, EcoHealth continues to maintain that the research it funded at the Wuhan Institute, using taxpayer money, had no connection with the spread of COVID around the globe.

The Chairs of several House Committees have now demanded that Daszak clarify inconsistencies in his statements with information that later became available, writing to him:

These revelations undermine your credibility as well as every factual assertion you made during your transcribed interview. The Committees have a right and an obligation to protect the integrity of their investigations, including the accuracy of testimony during a transcribed interview. We invite you to correct the record.

Investigating ‘national security threats’

The question of COVID's origins refuses to disappear from the headlines, even four years later; a recent study in Risk Analysis conducted last month found a 68% likelihood of an "unnatural [rather] than natural origin of SARS-CoV-2." The study's authors noted the extraordinary amount of overlap between a specific bat coronavirus and COVID:

One of the closest known bat coronaviruses, RaTG13, was being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and has 96.1 percent homology with SARS-CoV-2.

As reported by Politico,  a new bipartisan inquiry into the virus' origins has recently been established, headed by Senators Rand Paul, M.D. (R-Ky.) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee:

The duo announced yesterday they are investigating where Covid came from, the high-risk research that Paul believes caused the pandemic, as well as broader “national security threats posed by high-risk biological research and technology.”

Why it matters: Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are concerned about risky research.

The collaboration between Paul and Peters also means more scrutiny for government scientists.

Meanwhile, closer to home…

Focusing attention on an institute far away in China has certain advantages for politicians, given that there are over 200 biolabs located on American soil (providing Americans—their constituents—with jobs), as revealed almost a decade ago by two journalists writing for USA Today (their article appears to have been taken down, but is accessible via the internet archive here).

Research continues unabated, as does the fascination of scientists, most of them government-funded, for the bat species:

It has been an age-old question: what makes bats so fascinating to humans? 

As the authors of a study published in Cell last year noted, people are fascinated by bats due to echolocation—their ability to maneuver in the dark using sound waves. Scientists, however, focus their research on bats for a different reason:

Bats are distinctive among mammals due to their ability to fly, use laryngeal echolocation, and tolerate viruses … bats have evolved mechanisms to tolerate a large load of viral sequences… [emphases added]

Their research is not merely theoretical; it centers on diseases that already pose a threat to humans:

… what makes bats most distinctive is that many species … have been shown to tolerate and survive many viruses that have high mortality rates in humans, such as SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, Marburg, and henipaviruses. This is potentially due to a modulation of their innate immune response rendering them as asymptomatic and tolerant viral hosts.

So much knowledge, so little understanding of what to do with it

And much more research is, allegedly, needed, because despite the years of study, with their corresponding risk, very little (and perhaps no) progress has been made in understanding how bats thrive despite having high viral loads (although hypotheses abound). What have humans gained, in fact, from all the knowledge acquired in the hundreds of biolabs located around the globe?

To date, how bats deal with viruses is still poorly understood, with only a limited number of immune cells documented and characterized in a few [of the hundreds of] bat species … Further, developing cellular resources and assays is required to uncover and validate the molecular adaptations that have evolved in bats to tolerate these viral pathogens. The prevailing hypothesis supported by recent comparative genomic analyses of multiple bat families is that viral tolerance results from specific adaptations of their innate immune system. Accordingly, bats mount an inaugural antiviral reaction after viral inoculation—like all mammals—but then quickly “dampen” this very response before it becomes overly pathological. Critically, this unusual way to deal with viruses could be caused in part by molecular adaptations that stifle canonical virus sensing and the subsequent inflammatory response… [emphases added]

Not just China, not just America — it's global

Perhaps it would be more pertinent to ask not what humans have gained, but what they have lost—and what they are likely to lose in the future?

According to a former director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, the stakes could not be higher:

The great pandemic is coming. It’s not coming from spillover. It’s going to come from intentional bioterrorism or gain of function research. It’s gonna be a bird flu virus that is manipulated to be transmitted from human to human. Very similar to what we saw with COVID.

This research is being done in university laboratories all over the world. It hurts me to say this, but I do believe that the most likely answer when we get to the truth is it was caused by science, not by a natural spillover [emphases added].

More money for bat research in “safe” surroundings

Over a year into the COVID “pandemic,” in late 2021, Colorado State University (CSU) received a $6.7 million grant toward the construction of a biological facility at the Fort Collins campus, where yet more research into bats would be conducted, much of it focused on coronaviruses. In this new project, CSU is partnering with Dr. Daszak's Ecohealth Alliance.

According to the university, 

… bats hold unique, critically-important clues to understanding why and how people and animals get sick when exposed to disease-causing organisms known as pathogens…

Anticipating concern, CSU reassures that the Fort Collins biolab will only be dealing with “mild” diseases (such as COVID?) which can be “easily treated" (with cheap, safe, repurposed drugs such as ivermectin?):

In the new building, researchers will work with mild infectious disease pathogens that can be easily treated…

Furthermore, they will only be conducting the kind of gain-of-function research regarding which people apparently have no concern:

Q: Does CSU do gain-of-function research?

A: … CSU has no plans to conduct gain-of-function research of concern [emphases added].

They add that the university has a reputation for safety:

CSU has studied infectious diseases since the 1960s and has a long track-record of expertise, safety, and compliance… 

This reputation was challenged not long ago by the UK Daily Mail, which excoriated Colorado State University for a “shocking number of accidents in recent years”:

Bombshell documents show there were at least 50 incidents involving safety control lapses at Colorado State University between 2020 and 2023, including workers who were bitten by a Covid-infected hamster, splashed in the face with blood from mice with tuberculosis and scratched by rabies-infected cats.

The reports were never disclosed to the public despite occurring at the height of the Covid pandemic, which many officials, including the FBI, suspect was borne out of a similar lab accident in China.

It's not Fauci or Daszak — it's YOUR fault

Mainstream media in the United States, meanwhile, is concerned about bats for a different reason: climate change. According to NPR,

Almost every pandemic we've seen over the last century has come from a virus that's spilled over into humans from an animal…

Their article goes on to “explain” how deforestation forces bats to invade cities to find food, leaving behind droppings that cause “spillover” diseases.

Therefore, government attention and funding is best directed, so this theory goes, toward research into bat habitats and global warming, as a recent article in Nature describes:

Reducing the risk of future pandemics requires investment in prevention, preparedness, and response. At present, most attention and funding is allocated to mitigation after a pathogen is already circulating … By contrast, primary pandemic prevention—defined as reducing the likelihood a pathogen transmits from its animal host into humans (zoonotic spillover; Fig. 1)—has received less attention in global conversations, policy guidance, and practice…

So, don't blame the biolabs. Blame regular humans, for the crime of “using land”:

To effectively prevent pandemics, we must recognize two key points: first that pandemics almost always start with a microbe infecting a wild animal in a natural environment and second that human-caused land-use change often triggers the events–whether through wildlife trade or other distal activities–that facilitate spillover of microbes from wild animals to humans. As land-use change becomes more intense and extensive, the risk of zoonotic spillovers, and subsequent epidemics and pandemics, will increase [emphases added].