Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. Professor Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and is a University Professor, Columbia's highest academic rank. Sachs was Director of the Earth Institute from 2002 to 2016.

Professor Sachs is widely recognized for bold and effective strategies to address complex challenges including debt crises, hyperinflations, the transition from central planning to market economies, the control of AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, the escape from extreme poverty, and the battle against human-induced climate change. He is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, and an SDG Advocate for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. From 2001-18, Sachs served as Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General, for Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and Antonio Guterres (2017-18).

Professor Sachs was the co-recipient of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize, the leading global prize for environmental leadership. He was twice named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders and has received 28 honorary degrees. The New York Times called Sachs “probably the most important economist in the world,” and Time magazine called Sachs “the world’s best-known economist.” A survey by The Economist ranked Sachs as among the three most influential living economists. ¹⁾

Lancet Investigation Into Origin of Pandemic Shuts Down Over Bias Risk

The work of a task force commissioned by the Lancet into the origins of COVID-19 has folded after concerns about the conflicts of interest of one its members and his ties through a nonprofit organization to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. By Paul D. Thacker

The work of a task force commissioned by the Lancet into the origins of COVID-19 has folded.

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The work of a task force commissioned by the Lancet into the origins of COVID-19 has folded after concerns about the conflicts of interest of one its members and his ties through a non-profit organization to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Task force chair Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University in New York, told the Wall Street Journal that he had shut down the scientist led investigation into how the COVID-19 pandemic started because of concerns about its links to the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization run by task force member Peter Daszak.

“A lot is going on around the world that is not properly scrutinized or explained to the public,” Sachs told the newspaper, adding that the task force would broaden its scope to examine transparency and government regulation of risky laboratory research.

The decision came as evidence continued to accumulate that Daszak had not always been forthright about his research and his financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak now faces increased scrutiny from scientists, the media and members of U.S. Congress.

EcoHealth Alliance has been given millions of dollars in grants by the U.S. federal government to research viruses for pandemic preparedness. The alliance has subcontracted out its research, including around $600 000 (£434 000; €504 000) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Sachs has taken the correct action,” said Richard Ebright, professor of molecular biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a biosafety expert, adding that too many of the task force members had financial ties to EcoHealth Alliance, which he characterized as “disqualifying conflicts of interest.”

On the Lancet’s website for its COVID-19 commission, which set up the task force into the origins and early spread of the pandemic, a statement said that the work had ended in “the interests of ensuring transparency and objectivity.” A final report will be issued, but by the commission’s secretariat, “in consultation with global experts.”

Shortly after the pandemic began Peter Daszak led a February 2020 statement in the Lancet alleging that it was a “conspiracy theory” to argue that the pandemic could have started from a laboratory leak in Wuhan.

“I have no conflicts of interest,” Daszak later told the Washington Post, regarding his collaboration with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But Daszak’s story began falling apart last November when the non-profit group U.S. Right to Know published emails gathered through a freedom of information request that showed he had orchestrated the Lancet statement without disclosing that he was funding Shi Zhengli through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Daszak’s credibility took a further hit this June when Sachs published an essay that called for an independent investigation of the pandemic’s origin and charged that both China and the NIH should be transparent about virus research, including “gain-of-function” studies that make viruses more transmissible and virulent.

“It is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] that deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus,” Sachs wrote.

That same month the Lancet posted an addendum to the February 2020 statement, which had previously read, “We declare no competing interests.” The half page addendum discusses EcoHealth Alliance’s funding of researchers in China and studies involving recombinant bat viruses. Daszak also resigned that month from the Lancet task force.

In the weeks preceding Sachs’s decision to end the task force’s work, further information emerged questioning the veracity of several other statements made by Daszak.

After suing the NIH to gain access to Daszak’s grants, the U.S. media organization the Intercept released details of several of Daszak’s NIH grants and grant applications, including one that seemed to involve gain-of-function research by creating chimeric SARS viruses.

Both Daszak and the NIH’s Anthony Fauci have said that these experiments were not gain-of-function studies, which would have required the grant to have a risk mitigation.

However, a week after the Intercept’s story a group of online investigators called DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) published leaked documents that included a grant application that Daszak had submitted to the U.S. Department of Defense in 2018.

In that document Daszak proposed creating chimeric SARS viruses. The department declined to fund Daszak’s grant, adding that if it were funded in the future the chimeric research would require a risk mitigation plan for gain-of-function research.

“Jeffrey Sachs made the right decision,” said Gilles Demaneuf, a member of DRASTIC, adding that Daszak’s attempts to hide gain-of-function research from public scrutiny helped force this decision.

Shannon Murray, a staff scientist with U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), said that Daszak’s experiments that the Department of Defense had flagged for gain-of-function risk mitigation were the same as the ones he did with NIH grants. “It’s spelt out so clearly in the grants,” she said.

The NIH, however, has denied that the research met the criteria for gain-of-function risk mitigation. Daszak did not return The BMJ’s requests for comment.

Ebright noted that the conflicts of interest involving virologists denying that the pandemic could have come from a laboratory in Wuhan were “simply unprecedented.”

In a statement to The BMJ, U.S. Right to Know said, “There still has to be robust, independent investigations into the origins of COVID-19. It’s well past time for Congress and the World Health Organizations to do their jobs.”

Originally published by The BMJ Oct. 1 2021, written by Paul D. Thacker reproduced here under the terms of the CC BY NC license.

Paul D. Thacker is an American journalist who specializes in science, medicine and environmental reporting. He has written for Science, JAMA, Salon, The New Republic and Environmental Science & Technology. ²⁾

Jeffrey Sachs Presents Evidence of Possible Lab Origin of Covid-19 An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calls for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that could shed light on the origins of Covid. by Sharon Lerner - May 19 2022

In an article published Thursday, economist Jeffrey Sachs called for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that could shed light on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sachs and his co-author, Neil Harrison, a Columbia University professor of molecular pharmacology and therapeutics, said that federal agencies and universities possess evidence that has not been adequately reviewed, including virus databases, biological samples, viral sequences, email communications, and laboratory notebooks. Sachs and Harrison also highlighted a tantalizing scientific detail that may be an indication that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, originated in a laboratory: a sequence of eight amino acids on a critical part of the virus’s spike protein that is identical to an amino acid sequence found in cells that line human airways.

Sachs and Harrison are hardly the first to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 might have been created in a lab. Since its genetic sequence was first published in February 2020, scientists have puzzled over the furin cleavage site, an area on the virus’s spike that allows it to be broken apart by a protein on the membrane of human cells and makes the coronavirus particularly dangerous to people. Once split, the virus releases its genetic material into the cell and reproduces. While all viruses work by attaching themselves to cells, breaking apart, and releasing their genetic material, SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of its class, sarbecoviruses, to use this particular mechanism to do so.

As with past discussion of a possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, this latest theory has already been met with considerable pushback. Even some scientists who are open to the idea that a lab accident could have sparked the pandemic remain unconvinced by the particular trail of evidence laid out by Sachs and Harrison.

Growing List of Coincidences

The intriguing theory of viral engineering hinges on two observations: that the amino acid sequences match and that experts in both the ENaC-alpha furin cleavage site and the insertion of genetic sequences into bat coronaviruses happen to work at the same academic institution: the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Ralph Baric, whose work aims to prevent and create treatments for viral outbreaks, has previously inserted segments of DNA and RNA into viruses and created an infectious clone of SARS using his own patented “No See’m” method of inserting genetic materials without a trace. He has also collaborated on coronavirus research with scientists from a center for lung studies at UNC-Chapel Hill who are knowledgeable about ENaC-alpha. In one 2016 study, the scientists created a new virus using the spike of a bat coronavirus that had been isolated and characterized by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The experiment found that the new virus “replicated efficiently” in human airway cells that were cultured in a lab.

In another paper, published a year earlier, Baric, along with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli and a lung expert UNC-Chapel Hill’s lung institute, described creating a hybrid virus using a SARS-like virus from a bat and a “mouse-adapted” coronavirus. The new virus caused mice to get sicker than those exposed to the original virus. The goal of these experiments was to prepare for the possibility that a virus might jump naturally from animals to humans, as SARS had in 2003. But even before the pandemic, the experiment drew criticism from other scientists, who were concerned because the researchers had created a virus that was able to spread in humans.

Sachs and Harrison note that the scientists who co-authored the DARPA grant proposal would have been aware of research on coronavirus furin cleavage sites, including one 2006 experiment in which a furin cleavage site was inserted into a coronavirus. “The research team would also have some familiarity with the FCS sequence and the FCS-dependent activation mechanism of human ENaC, which was extensively characterized at UNC,” they write.

Still, both the overlap in the amino acid sequence and the fact that experts in the furin cleavage site of the ENaC-alpha and insertion of genetic material into bat coronaviruses work at the same university could be coincidental, as Harrison and Sachs acknowledge. Some virologists, though, say that the coincidence strains credulity.

“Could be,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote in an email to The Intercept when asked about the possibility that these things are both chance occurrences. “But the list of coincidences is getting verrrrrrrrrrry long.”

Ebright, a vocal proponent of the lab-leak theory whom Harrison and Sachs thank “for helpful commentary on the manuscript,” spelled out some of the other Covid coincidences that he considers questionable, including its initial outbreak in a city that, well before 2019, had already been pegged as a biosafety risk. Ebright also noted Wuhan’s 1,000-mile distance from the nearest wild bats that carry the type of SARS-related coronaviruses that caused the pandemic. And he pointed to the particular coding of the amino acids in the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV2.

“The sequence encoding the FCS of the pandemic virus contained two consecutive CGG arginine codons,” Ebright explained in his email. (A codon, or a combination of three nucleotides, supplies the genetic code for a single amino acid, though most amino acids can be represented by multiple different codons. Each nucleotide is represented by a letter — for RNA, either A, C, U, or G.) “This codon usage is unusual for a natural bat SARS-related coronaviruses (for which fewer than 1 in 30 arginine codons are CGG) but is optimal for humans (for which most arginine codons are CGG codons).”

Still, Ebright said that at first he didn’t see the identical amino acid sequences as particularly suspicious. “I had known for more than a year that there was a perfect match to an eight-amino acid sequence present in human ENaC. What I had not known was that the sequence was known to be a functional furin cleavage site and that it was a sequence extensively studied at UNC,” he said. “The crucial point that the ENaC sequence was a known functional site, not just that there happens to be a match to a protein that happens to be in humans. … That suddenly turned it from what I thought to be largely irrelevant to being a logical and obvious choice to proceed.”

Ralph Baric and the University of North Carolina did not immediately respond to requests for comment. ³⁾

August 25, 2022 - The Defender Show ‘The Defender Show’ Episode 64: The Origins of COVID-19 With Jeffrey Sachs ⁴⁾