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117 staffers sue over Houston hospitals vaccine mandate, say they dont want to be guinea pigs

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A group of 117 unvaccinated staffers from Houston Methodist Hospital filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to avoid the hospitals coronavirus vaccine mandate, saying its unlawful for bosses to require the shots.

The staffers join a growing list of employees challenging compulsory immunizations at businesses, colleges and other workplaces essential to the country’s reopening. Vaccine mandates have faced mounting resistance from anti-vaccination groups and some Republican politicians, even as health officials promote the proven safety of the vaccines and millions of Americans line up to get the shots every week.

The lawsuit against Houston Methodist was filed by Jared Woodfill, a Houston-area attorney and conservative activist. It appears to mirror a legal strategy used by a New York-based law firm, Siri & Glimstad, that is closely aligned with one of the country’s biggest anti-vaccination organizations but unaffiliated with the Houston litigation.

The complaint, filed in state court, says Houston Methodist’s vaccine mandate violates a set of medical ethics standards known as the Nuremberg Code, which was designed to prevent experimentation on human subjects without consent. The code was created after World War II in response to the medical atrocities Nazis committed against prisoners in concentration camps.

“Methodist Hospital is forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment,” the complaint states. It adds that the mandate “requires the employee to subject themselves to medical experimentation as a prerequisite to feeding their families.” Elsewhere, it falsely characterizes the coronavirus vaccines as an “experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection.”

Experts said the notion that the vaccines were “experimental” or based on an untested technology was incorrect.

“This claim is absurd indeed,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, told The Washington Post.

“There were tens of thousands of people who were in the Phase 3 clinical trials for the mRNA vaccines, and no safety concerns were found,” Iwasaki told The Washington Post in an email.

An experimental vaccine is one that has not gone through clinical trials and authorization or approval processes. While the coronavirus vaccines used in the United States have not received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, they have completed rigorous clinical trials and have been authorized for emergency use. Pfizer this month asked the FDA for full approval of the coronavirus vaccine it developed with German company BioNTech.

“After the emergency use authorization of these vaccines, there have since been 100s of millions of people being vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines with excellent safety record,” Iwasaki said.

The assertion that the vaccines alter DNA is also untrue. The mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna are not capable of changing a patient’s DNA, and they do not enter the part of the cell where DNA resides.

“The mRNA vaccines we currently have are as safe or safer than any previously used vaccine,” said Aileen Marty, an infectious-disease expert at Florida International University.

Marc Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist, said it was legal for health-care institutions to require vaccines. Houston Methodist has done so for the flu vaccine for more than a decade.

“As health-care workers, it is our sacred obligation to do whatever we can to protect our patients, who are the most vulnerable in our community,” Boom said in an email Saturday. “We proudly stand by our employees and our mission to protect our patients.”

Boom announced the mandate at the end of March, setting a June 7 deadline for employees to get the shots. As of Saturday, 99% of Houston Methodist’s 26,000 staffers had met the requirements, Boom said.

“It is unfortunate,” he said, “that the few remaining employees who refuse to get vaccinated and put our patients first are responding in this way.”

In their lawsuit, the vaccine holdouts say Boom’s order presented them with a choice: Either get a vaccine they believe may be unsafe or lose their job.

They accuse the hospital system violating state law, as well as federal public health law related to the use of medical products in emergencies, saying coronavirus vaccines have only been authorized for emergency use and therefore cannot be mandated. They want the court to issue an order barring Houston Methodist from terminating the unvaccinated employees.

The lead plaintiff is Jennifer Bridges, a Houston Methodist nurse whose public opposition to the hospital’s vaccine mandate has attracted hundreds of donors on GoFundMe. She told The Washington Post this month that she’s willingly submitted to “every vaccine known to man,” but believes the coronavirus vaccines need further study. Other plaintiffs include receptionists, technicians, administrative workers and nurses at the hospital, which is part of the Texas Medical Center, one of the largest medical complexes in the world.

The lawsuit, and similar cases making their way through the court system, could test whether employers can require employee vaccinations as the country navigates out of a pandemic that has killed nearly 600,000 Americans. There’s little case law governing when compulsory vaccinations are permissible, but the magnitude of the public health crisis may leave judges inclined to give employers leeway to require the shots.

Most employers have avoided mandates, but many universities have implemented them.

An update to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s vaccine guidelines may give employers more wiggle room. The agency said Friday that employers could require their staffers physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for the coronavirus so long as they make accommodations for an employee’s disability and religious beliefs.

The update included a caveat about mandating shots. “Employers should keep in mind that because some individuals or demographic groups may face greater barriers to receiving a covid-19 vaccination than others,” it said, “some employees may be more likely to be negatively impacted by a vaccination requirement.”

Published : May 30, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Derek Hawkins

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Biden budget lifts restriction on funds for abortions, keeps ban on pot sales

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WASHINGTON – President Joe Bidens proposed budget removes a provision that blocks D.C. from using local tax dollars to cover abortions for low-income women – but preserves a ban on selling and taxing marijuana in the nations capital, a blow to city leaders.

The spending plan released Friday also boosts money for the District’s Tuition Assistance Grants, which subsidize tuition at state universities for most D.C. residents.

In addition, Democratic Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city’s nonvoting representative in the House, said the White House has indicated it wants to start “winding down” a Republican-backed federal voucher program that offers taxpayer-funded private school scholarships to low-income D.C. students.

Each program or restriction is an example of the ways in which Congress wields unusual power over governance in the District of Columbia, which has pushed for years to become an independent state.

The Biden administration’s decision to remove the D.C. abortion rider appears to be in line with the president’s proposed elimination of the Hyde Amendment, which has barred states from using federal funds for abortion since 1976.

The D.C.-specific restriction, strongly backed by Republican lawmakers, means low-income women also could not get funding from the District government to help them access abortion services.

Congress can make changes as it considers Biden’s spending plan, and Republicans could put up a prolonged fight, based on their strong belief that taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund abortions. But Norton said she’s optimistic that Democrats’ narrow control of both chambers will make it harder for Republicans to restore the rider.

“It is the longest-standing rider we have had since I’ve been in Congress,” Norton said. “It’s really been the hardest to remove. Considering its widespread effects, that is a major improvement and accomplishment.”

According to the Congressional Research Service, Congress has placed some limit or prohibition on the use of taxpayer money to fund abortions in the District since 1979, with a short-lived reprieve in 2010. City leaders accused President Barack Obama in subsequent years of using the D.C. abortion rider as a “bargaining chip” in budget debates to avert a federal government shutdown.

Laura Meyers, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, described Biden’s move as “tremendous” for women in D.C. – as long as Congress sustains it.

“Because D.C. is not a state, D.C. cannot use its locally raised tax dollars the way 17 other states do to provide equal and equitable access to abortion for women,” she said. “And of course the burden falls disproportionately on people and communities of color.”

Norton said she planned to push her Democratic colleagues to remove both the abortion rider and the marijuana rider from the federal budget. She said she had a hard time squaring Biden’s decision to remove one rider but keep another, finding it “inconsistent” with the president’s strong backing of D.C. statehood.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee on financial services and general government, said he will oppose the inclusion in the budget of any provisions “that dictate to the District of Columbia what its laws should be or how it spends its money.”

“In my view, the Congress has no business substituting its judgment for the decisions of the elected representatives of the District of Columbia,” he said in an interview.

D.C. residents can possess and grow small amounts of marijuana, thanks to a voter-approved law from 2014. But the federal rider prohibits the city from regulating and taxing recreational sales of the drug, blocking the opening of recreational marijuana dispensaries and a potentially lucrative revenue option.

D.C. Council member Janeese Lewis George, D-Ward 4 said she and her colleagues fully expected that Biden would support the removal of the rider. In anticipation of such a change, Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser in February proposed the Safe Cannabis Sales Act of 2021, which would legalize recreational dispensaries, require automatic expungement of criminal records for certain marijuana convictions and distribute marijuana sales tax revenue to certain wards and programs to help disadvantaged residents.

“The feeling among all of us is disappointment and shock,” Lewis George said Friday of Biden’s inclusion of the rider in the budget. Especially after the economically devastating coronavirus pandemic, she said, the city was looking to generate more revenue with marijuana sales – and boost entrepreneurial opportunities in the Black community, which was disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about Biden’s decision to keep the rider in place. Press secretary Jen Psaki has previously said Biden supports states’ rights to legalize recreational marijuana, but the president has stopped short of endorsing legalization himself.

On the education front, Norton said the Biden administration is seeking to stop adding new students to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which was created by a Republican-controlled Congress in 2004. It is the only federally funded school choice program in the country.

The program is generally opposed by public school advocates, teachers unions and many Democrats. Bowser, however, has not lobbied to eliminate it – citing concern that doing so could jeopardize federal school funding for D.C. public and charter schools.

The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the scholarship program.

Published : May 30, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Meagan Flynn

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Tensions erupt in Tulsa as city commemorates 1921 race massacre

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TULSA, Okla. – A “Remember and Rise” concert organized by the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission was abruptly canceled.

Oklahoma’s governor was ousted from the commission for pushing limits on how racism is taught in schools. And some residents are planning to boycott the opening of Greenwood Rising, a new museum that construction workers are racing to finish in the heart of Black Wall Street.

As Tulsa commemorates the 100th anniversary of the brutal 1921 race massacre, political tensions and racial divisions have erupted in a city still grappling with how to heal a century after one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.

The commission organizing the commemoration has been denounced by some community groups who are staging their own events in Greenwood focused on massacre survivors and descendants.

Amid the strife, the city braced for armed groups to march through Greenwood, including a Second Amendment demonstration that was staged Saturday afternoon by the New Black Panther Party. The armed Panthers shut down streets, passing Standpipe Hill, where Black World War I veterans tried to hold off the White mob in 1921, and shouting “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! How we gonna get it? By any means necessary!”

President Joe Biden is scheduled to visit Tulsa on Tuesday, the day the city resumes its excavation of a mass grave in Oaklawn Cemetery that could be connected to the massacre.

Much of the acrimony in Tulsa revolves around the issue of reparations for the violence unleashed by a White mob on May 31, 1921, which left as many as 300 dead and 10,000 homeless and destroyed one of the most prosperous Black neighborhoods in the country. No one was ever punished for the attack, and the victims were never compensated for the lives and property lost.

The centennial commission, chaired by state Sen. Kevin Matthews, a Democrat, raised $30 million for the commemoration, the construction of Greenwood Rising and other projects. One of the most highly anticipated events was the “Remember and Rise” gathering on Memorial Day at ONEOK Field, which featured a performance by John Legend and a keynote speech by voting rights activist Stacey Abrams.

On Thursday, the concert was suddenly canceled “due to unexpected circumstances with entertainers and speakers,” the commission said in a statement.

But Tulsa activists and lawyers representing three of the last known massacre survivors – Viola Fletcher, 107, her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100, and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106 – said the celebrities pulled out after the commission failed to address requests that it use some of its funds to compensate survivors and descendants for what they lost during the rampage.

Matthews told reporters Friday that the lawyers for the survivors had initially sought inclusion in “Remember and Rise” in return for $100,000 each and a $2 million donation to a reparations fund.

After the commission agreed to those terms, Matthews said, the request changed to $1 million for each survivor and $50 million for the fund. “We could not respond to those demands,” he said.

But his account was disputed by the attorneys representing the survivors in a reparations lawsuit filed last year against Tulsa, Tulsa County, the state and the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce.

The legal team, it said in a statement, submitted a list of seven requests “to ensure the survivors participation with the commission’s scheduled events. The list included pledging to raise money for a fund that would provide direct financial support to the survivors and descendants.”

“There was never a non-negotiable demand for $50 million dollars. The non-negotiable issues were that the fund would provide direct financial support to survivors and descendants and that the fund would be administered by descendants and North Tulsa community members, and the fund be held in a Black bank.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/37073e4d-e371-435e-ab58-14bb703c3857?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

In an interview, Matthews said he would not comment on why the celebrities pulled out of the concert. The commission’s candlelight vigil, a ceremony scheduled for 10:30 p.m. Central time Monday to mark the time the first shot was fired in the 1921 massacre, will go on as planned.

“It is disappointing the national folks who were going to come to ONEOK Field are not coming,” Matthews said, “but that is not as important as the candlelight vigil, where we will honor those who have fallen and gone before.”

A number of activists said Matthews did not include survivors, descendants and Greenwood community activists in the initial stages of planning for the city’s centennial events.

“I’m speaking from experience,” said Jamaal Dyer, senior pastor of Friendship Church in North Tulsa, who resigned from the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission in 2019. “I was very vocal: ‘If we are going to do this for the community, we need to allow them to be part of the decision-making body.’ That was not welcomed. A year or two later, they went to them, but they had already started making decisions. They are still trying to control the narrative.”

Last week, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, was ousted from the centennial commission after he signed a bill that would prohibit public school teachers from teaching about “critical race theory” or lessons about race and racism that would make some students uncomfortable.

Carly Atchison, a spokeswoman for Stitt, said in a statement that the governor’s role on the commission “has been purely ceremonial.”

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., resigned from the commission earlier this week, with a spokesman telling KTUL that the senator “saw a drift from the original goals of the commission to a more partisan political agenda.”

Meanwhile, city officials have prepared for potential clashes between extremist groups, aware that Tulsa could be a target for white nationalists as well as the New Black Panther Party demonstration.

Carrying guns and marching in formation, dozens of Black Panthers paraded toward Greenwood, where people came out of nearby apartment buildings to shout support. They passed restaurants where White families were dining on patios. Some waved or put their fists in the air in solidarity. Others squirmed, looking uncomfortable.

“Don’t worry, this is the safest place in Tulsa!” one heavily armed marcher told them.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, a Republican, said the city has been working with state and federal officials to make sure “people who want to participate in activities and mourn this event, the worst event in our city’s history, feel comfortable being in public doing that with different groups coming to town.”

“It’s the classic case of hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” said Bynum, who reopened the investigation into whether there are mass graves from the massacre.

On Friday, Greenwood bustled with speeches, parades, vendors and a concert headlined by gospel legend John Kee that were organized by the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival.

“The Black Wall Street Legacy Festival is the only community-centered series led by survivors and descendants commemorating the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre,” said organizer Tiffany Crutcher, who testified before Congress on May 19 alongside the three massacre survivors to call for reparations.

Her group arranged for a parade Friday morning that featured the survivors – Fletcher, Ellis and Randle – in a procession through Greenwood and down Black Wall Street. They rode in a white carriage, drawn by a white horse, as they waved to crowds.

Last month, Randle issued a cease-and-desist letter demanding the commission to halt using her name or likeness to promote the official commemoration.

The survivors have accused the city of enriching itself by appropriating the massacre for “cultural tourism” that would benefit White developers.

During the May 19 hearing before a House Judiciary subcommittee, Damario Solomon-Simmons, the lead attorney in the reparations lawsuit, told Congress that the city and the centennial commission had not shared any of the $30 million raised for the commemoration with survivors.

“As I speak, the same perpetrators of the massacre – the city, the county, the chamber, the state – are utilizing a massacre to pad their own pockets,” Solomon-Simmons testified.

“Not one penny has been given to any of the survivors. Not one dime has been paid for any of the outstanding claims.”

Tulsa officials have said they cannot comment on the pending lawsuit.

In Oklahoma City, the state capital, state Rep. Regina Goodwin, a Democrat, fought to keep the word “reparations” in a resolution she introduced to commemorate the massacre, pointing out that the 2001 report by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission called for reparations – a recommendation that was ignored.

Republican lawmakers opposed to reparations urged her to remove the word “reparations” from the resolution.

After much debate, the word was allowed to stay in the House resolution, but it was removed from a resolution introduced in the state Senate.

When Biden arrives in Tulsa on Tuesday, where he goes will be watched closely. Will he visit the long-established Greenwood Cultural Center or the new Greenwood Rising? Will he meet with the survivors?

“Any president that comes to Tulsa to recognize the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre should be centering the survivors and descendants in every single aspect of their visit and should not lose sight of the fact they just came back from Washington pleading for their humanity to be recognized and that they not leave this earth without reparations,” said Dreisen Heath, who wrote the Human Rights Watch report “The Case for Reparations in Tulsa.”

On Friday, Heath watched the unveiling of the new Black Wall Street Memorial and the lighting of an eternal flame in Greenwood.

“There can be no justice without reparations,” Heath said. “Anything short of that has grand implications of the survivors’ lives, the descendants and broader Black community.”

The present-day struggles over a century-old massacre are unlikely to be settled anytime soon, said Michael Mason, a Tulsa journalist and founding member of the Center for Public Secrets, a counterculture arts center.

When Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited this city in 2004, “he called Tulsa a powder keg,” Mason said. “That is more true now than it was before because of unresolved tensions surrounding the massacre.”

Published : May 30, 2021

By : The Washington Post · DeNeen L. Brown

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With nearly 28,800 new Covid-19 cases, Asean sees biggest rise in over 2 weeks

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Southeast Asia continued to see a rising trend in new Covid-19 cases, with Saturdays total being the highest in over two weeks.

Asean countries reported 28,781 new cases on Saturday, higher than Friday’s 27,656.

However with 456 deaths, the numbers were less than Friday’s 479.

Total Covid-19 cases in the region crossed 3.97 million since the outbreak, while the death toll rose to 78,126.

Malaysia reported 9,020 cases, a new high for the fifth consecutive day, and 98 deaths, bringing cumulative cases in the country to 558,534 and 2,650 deaths.

Malaysia’s Health Ministry admitted that the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the country was partly due to people’s travels across states during the Ramadan festival.

Vietnam reported 286 cases on Saturday, bringing cumulative cases in the country to 6,856, while 47 have died. So far, 2,896 people have been cured and discharged.

The health minister reported that the country had detected a new coronavirus variant that is a combination of the strains found in India and the UK. He believed that the virus could spread quickly in confined areas, such as in factories.

Published : May 30, 2021

By : The Nation

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Covid lab leak theory goes from mocked to maybe

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WASHINGTON – In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus ripped through U.S. cities on its way to claiming more than 592,000 American lives, a group of senior U.S. national security officials warily eyed a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was well known in the scientific community for its research on coronaviruses to defend against outbreaks like the SARS epidemic, first identified in China in 2002. But to some of the officials, some of whom worked in the State Department and the White House, the lab’s location in the same city where the coronavirus pandemic began was a troubling coincidence.

Over the course of the pandemic, the officials joined forces, searching for information that might show whether the pandemic had been sparked by reckless or sloppy research in the lab, several of the now-former officials and others aware of their work said in interviews. Their search was partly conducted by a State Department group under Secretary Mike Pompeo that had initially examined China’s compliance with international weapons treaties, and then turned its attention to the lab and evidence of suspected Chinese military activity there.

Throughout much of the pandemic, the “lab leak” hypothesis has been ridiculed by scientists as a baseless conspiracy theory, fueled by President Donald Trump in an effort to deflect attention from his administration’s botched pandemic response.

Far from dismissing the lab-leak theory, however, President Biden has told his spies to see if the previous administration’s officials, whose work some of his own skeptical aides have called tendentious and overreaching, may have been right to question the lab and conduct a thorough investigation. The White House recently was told that a large amount of information remained to be examined that could shed light on the question, according to a senior administration official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Biden stunned security and health experts on Wednesday when he announced that at least one “element” of the intelligence community “leans more toward” a lab accident as the source of the outbreak, as opposed to a natural transference of the virus from an animal to a human.

“Jaw-dropping,” one of the Trump-era officials involved in the hunt for covid-19’s origins said of Biden’s remarks and the president’s order that the intelligence agencies “redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” about the pandemic’s origins. They are to report back in 90 days.

National security officials in the Trump administration had scoured classified intelligence data, scientific papers and even popular magazine articles trying to determine if the lab-leak hypothesis held water. They found no smoking gun, but they felt the information they had gathered demanded closer scrutiny, said several people who were involved in the effort.

The Wuhan lab’s location in the same city as the outbreak was for many the first point of suspicion. But more alarming was the Chinese government’s response to the outbreak.

Chinese officials seemed more interested in blocking investigations than aiding them, the former officials said. They had moved to silence doctors and journalists from reporting on the spread of the virus, which had appeared to first show up in hospital patients in Wuhan in December 2019.

Across the globe, security and health officials began speculating about the source of the virus shortly after it emerged, one former official said, adding that there was enormous frustration that the Chinese government was not more forthcoming with information and did not immediately allow international investigators into the country.

The evidence that the virus may have emanated from the Wuhan lab was circumstantial, the former officials stressed. Their default assumption, one of them added, which was shared by most scientists, was that the pandemic had begun in nature.

But as they read published reports about the kinds of research the lab was conducting, their concerns mounted. Some experiments appeared designed to make viruses more infectious and potentially deadly to humans. Such experiments are often conducted to develop more-effective vaccines and treatments.

The institute was on the radar of some health and national security officials, two former senior officials said, because there were questions about its safety standards and some of its research. These officials expressed frustration that there was not better funding in the intelligence community to gather more information on the lab’s activities.

The U.S. officials felt that experts should consider the possibility that the lab was engaged in risky research that might have sparked an outbreak.

Trump agreed. In April 2020, he first publicly raised the idea that the virus could have leaked from a lab. At the same time, Trump intensified his anti-China rhetoric, referring to the coronavirus as the “China virus.” A rise in anti-Asian hate crimes followed.

Trump offered no evidence to back the lab theory. His trade adviser, Peter Navarro, a longtime China hawk, accused the Chinese government of engineering the virus, offering no credible evidence to support such an audacious claim.

For some of the officials who were privately suspicious of the Wuhan lab, Trump’s and Navarro’s comments turned the lab leak scenario into a fringe conspiracy theory. It became nearly impossible to generate interest among health experts in a hypothesis that Trump had turned into a political weapon, they said.

But in the fall of 2020, momentum picked up again. The U.S. intelligence community had obtained information that three workers at the Wuhan lab had fallen ill in November 2019 with symptoms similar to covid, which had sent them to the hospital. Their symptoms were also similar to seasonal illnesses, including the flu, but they’d gotten sick the month before the initial cases of the disease were confirmed in Wuhan.

The officials had also come upon information that the Chinese military had been conducting experiments at the lab for years. That also renewed focus on the lab leak.

“The information about the sick workers was really striking,” said David Feith, who was the deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs at the time. “Simply knowing that there were secret military ties to the lab didn’t necessarily tell you where covid came from. But if you had a cluster of illnesses and they were indeed covid, that could be your Patient Zero,” said Feith, now an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security.

The new information “began a much larger effort to examine data” about the origins, said David Asher, who was a senior adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance at the time and had been working on investigations into China’s compliance with international treaties and its nuclear weapons program. When that work concluded, Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, became the leader of Pompeo’s task force looking into the origins of covid-19, which the secretary also believed may have emanated from the lab.

In the waning days of the Trump administration, the officials mounted an effort to declassify information, including some about the sick lab workers. On Jan. 15, the State Department released a “fact sheet” that was vetted by multiple agencies, including in the intelligence community, which stated that the virus could have spread naturally or come from a lab.

It described three categories of activity that pointed to the latter scenario, including the report of sick workers; the lab’s history of research on coronaviruses in bats; and findings that the Chinese military had secretly engaged “in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

The fact sheet, short though it is, stands as the most comprehensive public document to date on what the U.S. government knows about a possible lab leak.

One of the former officials stressed that the evidence has not substantially changed, but that there are many unanswered questions.

“There are a lot of coincidences and circumstantial stuff and the questions is: ‘When are too many coincidences too much?’ ” another former official said. “One side of the ledger is growing, and the other isn’t.”

While more scientists have said the lab leak theory is worthy of further investigation, many have cautioned against embracing it too enthusiastically.

“The only reason this story has any legs is the media has chosen to dress up old speculation as new information and claim that it’s evidence. It’s not. It’s speculative and all origin hypotheses remain possible,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.

Indeed, it took years to unravel the source of the SARS epidemic.

“A 90-day focus on coming to a definitive answer sounds good in ‘D.C. talk’ but is unlikely to come to a definitive answer,” said Chris Meekins, a former Health and Human Services official who is now an analyst at Raymond James, a financial services firm. Unless “we have definitive intelligence information that the U.S. has refused to release thus far to protect sources and methods, I’m not sure what will change over the next 90 days to change their minds.”

Published : May 29, 2021

By : The Washington Post · Shane Harris, Yasmeen Abutaleb