On June 15, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs spoke to the Madrid-based GATE Center, a think tank, about issues including sustainable development in the world after the COVID-19 pandemic.
For two years, Sachs chaired The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, , among other things, “scrutinize the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the virus that causes COVID-19.
Sachs‘ Madrid speech included what he called a “provocative statement” concerning the origins of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. He said (emphasis added):
Some media outlets interpreted Sachs’ comments as follows:
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying also chimed in, citing Sachs’ comments to reinforce Beijing’s repeated claims that the United States should be investigated as the source of the COVID-19 pandemic. China has provided no direct evidence, and U.S. labs have denied such claims.
The wording of Sachs’ statement does create ambiguity; still, RT and the others summarized his full remarks in a misleading way that downplays the disclaimer, "We don't know for sure, I want to be absolutely clear."
They shorthand the actual phrase “U.S. lab biotechnology” to instead mean a “U.S. biolab.” And Sachs did not say the coronavirus "leaked" from a U.S. lab.
In more extensive commentaries published in May, however, he and a co-author had speculated that the virus may have resulted from a U.S.-China research partnership involving the National Institutes of Health, a biolab at the University of North Carolina, and labs in Wuhan, China.
The pair argued that an independent, thorough investigation should be launched by U.S. authorities, but again there were important disclaimers.
"We do not assert that laboratory manipulation was involved in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, although it is apparent that it could have been," he and co-author Neil Harrison in a commentary for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"However, we do assert that there has been no independent and transparent scientific scrutiny to date of the full scope of the U.S.-based evidence."
Sachs did not respond a Polygraph.info request to clarify his statement in Madrid.
Sachs and Harrison, a Columbia University professor of anesthesiology and pharmacology, also co-authored for The Boston Globe newspaper titled, “Questions surrounding the origins of COVID-19 remain unanswered,” published on May 31.
In that piece, also carefully worded, they said “[t]he origins of the COVID-19 pandemic remain unknown but may have had an assist from advanced U.S. biotechnology.”
Their concerns center on the contentious issue of "gain-of-function" research, an approach that involves altering the qualities of a virus to gauge its potential for causing widespread disease. Gain-of-function studies aim to discover threatening pathogens in advance to prevent widespread disease.
The United States with science partners in Wuhan, China, where COVID-19 was first detected in late 2019.
In their Globe commentary, Sachs and Harrison focused attention on a specific genetic feature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that “enhances the ability of the virus to enter and infect human cells,” questioning whether that feature evolved naturally or was “put into the virus by a laboratory manipulation.”
They stated that inserting this feature, called a "furin cleavage site," into viruses for experimentation had been "an aim of a U.S.-China research team, using biotechnology developed by U.S. scientists.”
Sachs and Harrison then discuss , a 2018 grant proposal to test engineered bat coronaviruses in humanized mice and measure their capacity to cause disease. A second part proposed testing ways to suppress bats in rural China from shedding potentially harmful viruses.
“Much of this work was to be carried out in a Wuhan laboratory with a low level of biosafety control,” Sachs and Harrison wrote in the Globe. Partners included the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a at the University of North Carolina.
Project DEFUSE was submitted for a $14 million grant to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) but rejected. Still, Sachs and Harrison suggest the work may have been “undertaken anyway.”
“We have no idea, but it is standard procedure to carry out preliminary work, or even a whole project, whether or not a particular grant is accepted. And in truth, the DEFUSE proposal is part of a much larger, and still hidden, research agenda overseen by the NIH,” they said.