“The DRASTIC people are doing better research than the U.S. When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth. government asking similar questions were operating in an environment that was as politicized and hostile to open inquiry as any Twitter echo chamber. With disreputable wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other, the DRASTIC researchers often felt as if they were on their own in the wilderness, working on the world’s most urgent mystery. As proof, they paraded a Hong Kong scientist around right-wing media outlets until her manifest lack of expertise doomed the charade. President Donald Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and purposefully unleashed it on the world. State Department investigators say they were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box.”Īt times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against China.
Their stated objective was to solve the riddle of COVID-19’s origin. Together, they formed a group called DRASTIC, short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. Some were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes. As they posted their findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world.
Having connected online, Demaneuf and de Maistre began assembling a comprehensive list of research laboratories in China. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre.
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