If the Lab-Leak Theory Is Right, What’s Next?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
And, were any humility to arise out of that exercise, perhaps they could direct that newfound and unfamiliar trait towards some other things they currently dismiss as "conspiracy theories".
Most didn't stop at "maybe this escaped from the lab in Wuhan", but went down the real rabbit hole accusing the Chinese government of manufacturing and releasing a bioweapon.
In any case there won't be any proof ever for any origin theory, the Chinese government has made certain of that.
As an anecdote, someone recently asked me if we could tell if the COVID genome had come via animals/natural origin or engineered in some way. I said that most likely, yes that should be possible. Their immediate reaction was that this meant I didn’t believe in lab leak. That’s not at all what I had said
How?
Current facts on the ground:
- 1st response to CoVID occurrence was certainly in Wuhan.
- The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
- Wuhan had two institutes which, on record, did gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses
- SARS had a record of lab escapes past the previous pandemic even without live animal hosts.
I don't think it's fair to say that "most" of these people thought it was deliberately released, whether or not they believed it was a bioweapon.
Most of the mouthbreathers talking earlier about the "China virus" labs was predominately with pro-trump, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker individuals (well, starting with trump first). It was political grandstanding at its best, combined with 'us vs them' mentality, and a hefty scooping of conspiracy theory. So yes, the bulk of us thinking peoples justly figured this was what it appeared to be: yet another Anti-Chinese diatribe done by a white nationalist conspiracy nut (aka: trump).
1. COVID wasnt caused by 5G. Nor vice versa.
2. We've seen MERS, SARS, and other coronavirus diseases previously in the region. This isn't the only one, and wont be the last.
3. "Chinaman virus" is a point that comes from racism. It only highlights racist beliefs, and is no way any proof. (Why wasnt the "Spanish Flu" called "Kansas Kough" - it started on a Kansas military base?)
4. The most vehement supports of this conspiracy also loudly proclaim that masks don't work, and the vaccine is microchipped.
5. Masks work, of different efficacy depending on filter levels
6. No, the vaccine has no microchips.
And if you want to dig deeper, go watch the "Plandemic" video. That's an hour or so of conspiracy, including the elites infected the plebes to make more money.
When 1 conspiracy is chopped off, 2 take its place.
To you, a theory is invalid if your political enemies embrace that theory.
And back in October 2020, this was published: https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2... . Is this right, or wrong?
This whole pandemic could have been handled as "We are following the medical and scientific establishment on best handling of the pandemic", but that wasn't the case. Instead, we have US states that have 'declared' Covid done, or worse yet have states that forbid companies providing proof of vaccination. The simple requirement of wearing masks, was rarely enforced. Quite a lot of assaults happened because workers at stores said something.
The politicians could have moved out of the way for science. They didnt, and they doubled down. And that got more people killed.
Your decision to turn it into a political question is a dead-end that prevents you from thinking.
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2...
-------------------------
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ODNI News Release No. 11-20
April 30, 2020 Intelligence Community Statement on Origins of COVID-19
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Office of the Director of National Intelligence today issued the following Intelligence Community (IC) statement:
“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to U.S. policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China. The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.
“As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to U.S. national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
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Stress on the quote: "The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified."
So, is it for scientific or political reasons you are ignoring this?
Sure, Trump seems prone to accepting conspiracy theories (or at least acts like it) - but why "white nationalist"? Seems like people like to sprinkle in these accusations when they thing their audience won't question it - but the evidence is a weak string of unsubstantiated guilt-by-associations.
The idea was good (hit mark audience that needed respite from all the "great globalization"), but the execution was about treason ("Trump First").
Also, I don't really consider a "white nationalist" to be a "nationalist" by the usual sense of the word (applying to nation), but rather a rarer, more abstract sense of the word (applying abstractly to "groups" such as race). White nationalism isn't necessarily compatible with race-defined nationalism e.g. if you would prioritise foreign whites over domestic non-whites.
Part of the solution would be to say something along the lines of "Right now we don't have enough evidence to make a statement about the origin of the virus, so we'll refrain from talking about it until further evidence is brought to light.".
Though, media will report what various individuals and agencies report, and they will contradict eachother.
Geraghty:
> And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.
> But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.
Engber:
> Arguments in favor of the “lab-leak hypothesis” remain grounded, as they ever were, in the mere and highly suspicious fact that a coronavirus likely borne by bats, likely from a cave in southwest China, emerged 18 months ago, quite suddenly, in a city very far from southwest China—where researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses.
As Geraghty recounts yesterday (https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/even-xavier-...), many in the media, rather than assessing the facts themselves, just resulted to name calling against a conservative-leaning but measured writer. I also haven't seen Geraghty (and again, other more measured writers) claim to have definitive proof of the lab-leak theory (as some conspiracy theorists might claim), only that it is a possibility that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. It is illogical, irresponsible and unscientific to say "well, this theory was picked up by racists, therefore we should dismiss it" rather than evaluating a possibility on it's own merits.
It's not even considered by the people who are aware of the history of mass anti-Sino biological warfare that took place around WW2 and the decades after.
So I ask you: what evidence, even circumstantial, do you have for making the claim you do?
Motives... the Chinese have no incentive to maliciously release a virus in their own country during an event that is tied to national pride and acts as a showcase of Chinese domestic development in Wuhan. The western warhawks on the other hand have a tremendous interest in obstructing any Chinese military cooperation with its peers. The potential motives seem quite clear...with the nice side effect of disrupting Chinese trade as the world recoils from a new downside risk of globalization.
The US and its allies have a long history of biological warfare against economic competitors. Even the Japanese bio-warfare campaign in WW2 China was supported, partially funded, and fully pardoned by the US/UK...people and history books tend to forget/omit that Imperial Japan received all of its oil and much of its supplies from the US. These supplies being cutoff (aka treaty violation) without FDR's/Churchill's knowledge are what resulted in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
During periods of uncertainty, it's good to remember that America's left hand doesn't always know what its right hand is doing... and vice versa.
I tend to think history is in the process of rhyming again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_Ei_1644
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaimingjie_germ_weapon_attac...
There’s always been more evidence to support the lab leak theory for those paying attention.
I have no doubt there's good evidence pointing to the lab leak origin, but virtually everything I've been exposed to over the last year are typically rumors or graphics shared on social media. Hearing something a lot doesn't give it additional credibility.
"researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses"
Researchers were studying viruses that had an animal origin. The lab leak would be from not following proper safety protocols.
Mistaking one for the other is highly probable.
In the case of covid there seemed to be universal belief in the media that covid originated in animals. There was no proof of this claim.
It’s one thing to just simply pick a claim and believe in it. It’s quite another to attack people who are providing an alternative claim.
The same thing rings true with regard to what is a “correct” thing to say. “China Virus” is apparently repugnant. However, naming the country of origin for variants is not. South African Variant is fine.
As for origins of COVID, I personally believe there is a good chance it came from bats, but also a good chance that it came from a lab experiment that had accidentally escaped. The theory that it was deliberately developed as a bio weapon or that it was released on purpose does not seem to hold water as there are no clear plausible beneficiaries of that action.
You can replace "main stream media" with any other group as well. (for example, the group that think masks and vaccines are part of a "plandemic" to undermine our economy and track everyone via 5g towers controlled by lizard people, while giving credence to medications recommended by politicians rather than medical professionals)
This centralized system of information dissemination has tremendous flaws.
No, the response was to ridicule people making those arguments and to censor them.
Like Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post telling Ted Cruz last May:
"I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves."
Or like "Twitter bans Chinese virologist claiming that coronavirus was made in a lab".
As usual, best summed up by the Babylon Bee:
"World-renowned fact-checking website Snopes has unveiled a brand new fact check rating called "False For Now." This will allow them to provide a rating for claims that are just conspiracy theories uttered by deranged far-right people until they later turn out to be true".
Point stands though. Lacking the ability to argue the case, the press often derive authority from the ability to slander, censor and humiliate.
Heck, US has a mature president now even acknowledging there are two major competing hypotheses. Seeing leaders embracing uncertainty is rare, so it seems humanity is going through a learning phase right now, having to face up to uncertainty and fear.
There are examples of these in these comments, so if you doubt that these things are true (and cannot find examples in this thread) then please narrow it down to one - this isn't a wikipedia articles, theres as much burden on you to disprove something you disagree with, and you haven't yet stated you disagree with anything.
So there's nothing further to discuss.
Further more, the media needs to maintain that standard themselves:
- No more anonymous, un-interrogatable sources;
- No accusations of bad motive (e.g. racism) without proof - such as those implied of the conspiracy theorists.
The claim that the virus might have originated in the lab? No.
it's perverted interests and motivations.
Most of what can reasonably called the mainstream media was misrepresenting lab leak theories as racist QAnon ramblings for a year before it entered the "it's okay to believe this" realm. This kind of dismissal ends up being the default mode for any idea which doesn't fall within a very narrow approved view of reality.
What happens is, people discuss something plausible for which there exists circumstantial evidence (e.g. lab leak theory). Then, the media, left and right, pretends it has defininitve answers and uses "q anon" as an excuse to claim the plausible theory is wrong.
The left wants to pretend that there are all these loony q anon believers just like the right wants to pretend all left-wingers are antifa anarchists. In reality, these are tiny groups that most Americans find utterly repulsive. And, perversely, the media's breathless coverage of these groups is boosting their membership.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/study-finds-...
People don't like getting vaccines for rational reasons like: they don't like getting shots (much less 2), they're worried about side effects (which are real), they don't trust new technology (like mrna vaccines), and so on.
I think people should get vaccinated. But I understand why someone wouldn't and it has nothing to do with believing in q anon. It's like paying your taxes: I don't like paying my taxes but I do it because 1. I drive on the roads and 2. it's illegal not to. If not paying taxes was legal, I hope I'd still pay (because I drive on the roads) but a lot of people wouldn't (even though they should) for reasons that have nothing to do with being a conspiracy theorist.
Under a: say whatever gets you clicks. Period.
Under b: hypotheses and theories cannot be reported as truths. Hard evidence is needed. There are two ways a virus evolves- naturally or guided/engineered. Without proof of the latter it is safe to assume former. No humility needed. If/when we have evidence of latter we can now report that.
This lead to predictable debacles on mask usage, airborne spread, everyone's pet theories of innate population immunity, seasonality of the virus, virus origins, etc.
And yet - there are zero calls for introspection, blameless post-mortems. Nobody seems to care.
i view the last decade (perhaps two) as a complete shattering of nearly all epistemology and social trust
we are all now wandering in a forest of mirrors
or perhaps, rather, this is not a new condition, and we merely understand it
I'm not saying that I know that it did come from a lab, but to say it definitely didn't is just as silly in my opinion.
Another example: Just last year, we had Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all saying they won't trust any Trump vaccine (https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...)
So there's basically three questions:
- was this virus a lab escape?
- if it was a lab escape, was that because it had been isolated from elsewhere, bred in the lab, or was it deliberately engineered for some purpose?
- regardless of origin, was the escape somehow intentional? This seems unlikely given that it was first a disaster for China and - like all bioweapons - cannot really be targeted. There has been no visible politics associated with this, so we could apply the Dr Strangelove argument: what good is a superweapon if you don't tell anyone about it?
And a question for the future:
- what is the minimum tech level for virus engineering? At what point can a random militant just 3D print themselves a plague with no co-conspirators? We're a long way off that, but I don't think HN is willing to bet on technology being intractable forever.
And for all of these:
- what real evidence do we have?
- if this were true, what would we do about it?
For example, you will not take the same action if it is the result of someone intentionally taking the virus out or if there is something wrong with the ventilation system. And addressing both "just to be safe" will not help much it waste management turned out to be the problem.
On that note, from the very beginning China's reaction appeared extreme and overbearing, but in hindsight it worked better than most other countries' responses. The question is... if other countries had known that it was from an accidental leak would they and the population in general have taken it much more seriously? I think they would have. If it were proven to be from a leak would there be less vaccine hesitancy? I think so too. The strongest contrarian argument against doing anything was always "it's just a flu" and some variation of "let nature take its course."
A natural virus could evolve to be very dangerous and a lab leak could give you a sore throat for a day. Origin != danger level.
Facts and figures are next to worthless when trying to motivate billions of people to do something. If people hear "Covid gives you flu symptoms", they aren't going to care. If people hear "Covid is an experimental virus that escaped from a lab", that's scary and people will care more.
No, it actually did not. It was clear that they tried to hide it and downplay it in the beginning. But once the cat was out of the bag and you could see picture of clinics overcrowding, they figured out it as quite deadly. They were able to use both the lessons of SARS(due to which people were much more amenable to drastic measures) and being a totalitarian regime to suppress it.
The problem with this angle is, ‘what if the destruction of evidence and obstruction of inquiry’ already happened? Then shouldn’t we blame destruction and obstruction?
What you can't do is make up what would have been found if there had been evidence.
If it was a lab escape, the virus may have been from a number of sources, but one would think their end goal was to create a vaccine / study it.
If you look at this from a high level, there were countries that did better with this and countries that did worse. On the whole, democratic, free countries have trouble controlling what their citizens do. So this has a slight benefit for countries that have more “control” over their citizens or stricter laws. Everyone loses something though, so I don’t think it was intentional.
I would say the longest game would be to create a virus like this and the vaccine, vaccinate your people, then spread it and let the rest of the world deal with a pandemic. But then you still can’t control mutations. And I don’t think this was the case with this one at all.
If it’s true, what do we do about it?
Nothing. We can’t do anything. Saving face is likely more valued than the truth coming out, and it would potentially cause a revolution and great instability if this got out. It could be World War III and lead to more death.
What does America do next time?
Be a hell of a lot more aggressive with emerging illnesses and with our support. If it is a well known secret that they had a leak before but we don’t publicize it, other countries may be more welcoming to support and transparency if it happens again.
I think all we can do in this case is look forward and put things in place so it doesn’t happen again.
Off-topic, but that's a very big misconception, and also very common misconception. The bigger is the weapon, the more you gain to have it hidden not the other way around, moreover a superweapon like an H-bomb.
On-topic, it's very much clear that the COVID blame assignment is pretty much a proxy now for Western World's decision how to treat China now.
In case a smoking gun level proof is found, and it is any much blameable on Beijing, Western politicians will not be engaging China for the next 5-8 years, for sure.
Was it a disaster for China? A virus that primarily killed elderly and immune-compromised persons? The virus leaves China with a younger, healthier and more productive population. China's economic situation is better today than it was before the pandemic b/c they now have a reduced dependent population.
Mao Tse-tung said he did not fear nuclear holocaust b/c their huge population protected China from being wiped out. In contrast, other nations would be annihilated. That is an idea CCP members are familiar with:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Mao%27s+comments+on+nuclear+war+po...
It's also important to have a healthy amount of skepticism and not fall into authoritarian thinking. The CDC and WHO are not beacons of flawless truth, as they revealed by the CDC unashamedly lying to the public about mask safety, and the WHO doing backflips to appease China and reject Taiwan's status as an independent country. Wherever the virus came from, so be it, whether that's a lab in China or a bat in Madagascar. But always be very careful when entities are invested in making you believe what they believe, rather than helping you be rational and consider the realistic possibilities.
Tell the lab to stop gain of function research.
Any kind of gain of function research lab needs to run under continuous international supervision from now on.
International Space Station (ISS) could serve as a good analogy here: have scientists and auditors from many countries in there so that we know what goes on day-to-day.
After that? Hold any country doing independent gain of function research responsible (from potentially building a bioweapon)
"Please don't kill millions of people again".
There's still no evidence, anywhere, that this lab did any gain of function research.
The only gain of function research that was know was done was on American soil with SARS-CoV-1 in mice, where it gained function in mice (and most likely lost function in humans).
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/fa83463a-4737-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...
Kind of incendiary to act as if it's true.
I do agree that it might be worth examining the wisdom of keeping virology institutions near cities.
The same as not wanting to publicize the results of the vaccine effectiveness with Trump in office "not to make it seem he should have the credit".
But I fully know that "that's what the libtards say" is an equivalent idiotic argument.
Luckily I don't live in the US and I never felt forced to pick a side. I have always been skeptical about the origins of the virus and even know I am not afraid to say that I don't know. It could be artificial or natural but I have yet to see something really conclusive.
I am afraid what will happen when all Earth will live as a single society under a single government. I see too much stupidity and idiotic dynamics in human societies and I always managed to keep away or change my surroundings. As we become more and more connected this is becoming harder and harder.
>The same as not wanting to publicize the results of the vaccine effectiveness with Trump in office "not to make it seem he should have the credit".
Indeed, last year we had Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all saying they won't trust any Trump vaccine (https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...)
Speaking as a fully vaccinated person, had Trump won reelection, the current relentless media drumbeat over a) how safe COVID19 vaccines are, b) how great the deployment has been, and c) how if you don't get vaccinated yesterday you are an antivax nut and traitor to the human race would be completely different.[1] We'd be hearing a lot more about the "Trump vaccine", both by the Trump administration itself (because it's the one that in March 2020 began Operation Warp Speed, the process of throwing incredible amounts of money at every proposed vaccine that resulted in the happy situation today of the US's massive and growing surplus of shots from multiple manufacturers) and by powerful media and opposition-politics voices continually highlighting every real and imagined fault in vaccines.
[1] The federal government is almost completely uninvolved in the end-user vaccine delivery process. The process since the beginning—i.e., before the election—has been for the federal government to distribute vaccine supplies to each state based on population, with each state's government responsible for everything else.
Ignoring the possibility of an escape, even in the absence of hard data, would be unnecessarily cavalier.
Just to make it clear, I am talking about an accidental release of an otherwise wild virus. I'm not implying the virus was engineered.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_deaths
What if the lab leak story is not true, but it continues being pushed by the sitting US administration for political purposes, then what happens next?
I think a parallel is the Soviet disinformation campaign in 80es trying to link AIDS to secret US biological weapons research. Especially in poorer countries it contributed to skepticism and paranoia around treatments and prevention measures. Ultimately the Soviet empire collapses while the paranoia and mistrust in official authorities persists.
Them it will serve the task of galvanising West's otherwise weak popular demand to do anything about China.
The political system in the West is driven by two things: elections, and lobbying. Western politicians will not go on offensive on China if it will not win them the election, and will probably oppose it if will loose them the election (imagine protesting angry hipster not getting their new iphone.)
The problem as I see it is that you are injecting your own population with anti-science and paranoia. Ultimately this may come back to haunt you.
I would expect Congress to reallocate DoD budgets, from trillion-dollar planes that stop flying if you look at them funny, to building enough PCR monitoring infrastructure and vaccine-generation capacity to nip any such future pandemic in the bud.
Without a doubt, countries like the US, Russia, and China, have tons of experiments going on as we speak that have the potential to create another COVID-19 or worse.
Why does lab-origin reporting not come with a bright line between an engineered virus and samples collected for study?
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain...
Why is the left so uninterested in finding the truth here? This “if it came from a lab, what next” narrative is complete gaslighting.
It was pushed by the Trump administration and now by the Biden administration.
For a take on what is wrong with it see:
I googled lab leak for the first time just now. I haven’t wanted to get involved in the team sports. But anyway my mind is made up. The Seattle times (iirc) has a good timeline of all the developments. Bat infested copper mine workers fell ill with an “extremely similar” virus to COVID 19 back in 2012 and that virus was sampled and taken to WIV. It’s pretty much impossible to deny at this point. Which makes sense because nobody would be talking about it otherwise.
Just because Trump said something doesn't make it mainstream. Until this week Facebook even blocked people from suggesting it was a possibility.
What next is Western governments getting a solid scapegoat.
They can say "We completely bungled the quarantine, but now you can blame commies"
With so many Western governments guaranteed to loose their next election, only an absolutely massive outrage can save them.
As a scientist, I would love to know how why and where this covid strain started. But understand that lab-leak or lab-escaped is just a stones throw away from lab-created and the last thing we need is science blamed for this virus.
With conservatives in the US so hell bent on defunding anything science related, this would only be used to kill off research programs. We need these programs to be researching against these pathogens now, so that when something new pops up we have methods to create vaccines. If it hadn't been for decades of covid research there wouldn't have been a covid19 vaccine created in 9 months. It would have been years, possibly decades, with our only hope of containment some kind of collapse of the virus similar to the Spanish Flu of 1918.
I think this is the primary reason so many virologists are against the lab-leak idea. It's not because they think it's unlikely, but because if people were aware of how dangerous this research was the funding would dry up and it might even get banned.
He also claimed that China threatened the United States with cutting off our supply of masks if our government acknowledged the fact that all of the circumstantial evidence pointed to a lab-leak. China has been known to do this and it was certainly to their benefit, so it strikes me as plausible. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Biden admin is now signaling support for lab-leak just as it is becoming clear that the pandemic is now over.
As a person with some background in biology, I initially dismissed lab-leak because the popular discussion was about engineered viruses which is bullshit. I didn’t know about gain of function. I’m personally heavily in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis.
The entire world was a science experiment for a year. Stop gain of function research. Stop stigmatizing prepper culture.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/04/covid-tru...
By the end of March, China had delivered aid to 120 countries, a massive “mask diplomacy” effort. Early on, these Chinese efforts were widely welcomed — but later “mask diplomacy” would become synonymous with China’s use of aid as a means of leverage over countries that might want to criticize it or its handling of the coronavirus outbreak that had begun within its borders.
...
Privately but explicitly, Chinese diplomats told U.S. officials they would cut off exports of medical supplies to the United States if Washington wasn’t careful in this war of words. Beijing was seeking to snuff out any discussion of the virus, along with any criticism of its domestic response and any allegation that it was hiding or misrepresenting information about the virus. In a move that U.S. officials saw as punitive, Beijing had halted exports of items such as face masks, even when they were made by American companies like 3M, which had factories inside China
Add that to their ethnic and religious cleansing, suppression of all descent, acts of aggression towards their neighbours and 101 other issues and decide: is sanctioning them worth the costs?
I think so. Many disagree.
https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
The press likes to stir things up because emotional people follow their stories more and make them more popular. But this is definitely putting the cart before the horse. Stirring up a mob almost never ends well.
And yes, he does talk about gain-of-function. His background is in high risk biocontainment viruses, and his PhD was specifically focused on Ebola-, Hanta-, and Flavi-viruses.