In Testimony, Robert Garry Declines To Rule Out That Researchers Brought Ebola To West Africa In 2014 - Independent Science News | Food, Health and Agriculture Bioscience News (original) (raw)

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

Newly released written testimony provided by Robert Garry to the Senate’s Committee on the Origins Of COVID-19 documents him evading questions about whether his institution brought Ebola virus to West Africa prior to the 2014 Ebola outbreak

In testimony supplementing his in-person statements, Garry was asked by the Committee’s Senator Marshall to deny that Ebola could have been brought from central Africa to Kenema, Sierra Leone, where his organisation, the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC), operated from.

“Can you categorically state that, prior to the confirmed outbreak in March 2014, no samples containing live Zaire Ebola virus were brought to Kenema from central Africa?” asked the Committee (Question 4).

Garry’s reply followed the wording of the question but introduced two key caveats: no samples containing “confirmed” Ebola were brought by “members of the VHFC” wrote Garry. The “confirmed” modification allows that biological samples of other kinds, possibly containing unconfirmed Ebola, were brought from Central Africa.

And further, Garry also wrote: “I do not have knowledge of all activities that were being conducted by other groups”.

This second caveat distances him from “other groups” that may have brought biological samples from Central Africa. This caveat was repeated by Garry four times in answering the eight questions put by the Committee.

Prominent among these “other groups” present at the Kenema Government Hospital (KGH) compound at the time was the controversial “pandemic prevention” company Metabiota.

The Ebola outbreak of 2014

Garry’s testimony provides new insights into the possibility that the VHFC’s research facility in Kenema, Sierra Leone, was the source of the Ebola epidemic that catastrophically struck West Africa in 2014. The 2014 epidemic was caused by a then-new variant of Ebola virus, now known as the Makona strain, and it led to 30,000 Ebola cases and over 11,000 recorded deaths, mainly in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea.

Prof. Robert Garry testifies (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The 2014 Ebola outbreak was initially detected in Guinea, West Africa, along its border with Sierra Leone, in March 2014.

Mystery has nevertheless always surrounded this outbreak’s origin. Zaire Ebola, as it was then known, is the most virulent form of Ebola virus, but it was previously unknown in West Africa. Zaire Ebola was confined to Central Africa, 2,000 miles away.

Moreover, the West African Ebola epidemic featured a single genetic source of the virus (which is typically considered a strong signal of a lab accident) and indeed no animal source was ever found. Hence suspicion has surrounded the Kenema site which is less than 80 miles from the Guinea border where the outbreak was first detected.

The Kenema Government Hospital compound is the long-term African base of Garry’s VHFC, which is a research project of US universities and institutions including The Broad Institute of Harvard, Scripps Research of San Diego, and Garry’s Tulane University. This consortium, established in 2010, just three years before the 2014 Ebola outbreak began, focusses on the understanding, detection, and treatment of hemorrhagic fevers, including Lassa Fever and Ebola Viruses.

The Metabiota question

Among the “other groups” using the KGH facility and who might have transported samples there from Central Africa was Metabiota corporation, funded at the time by USAID.

In what appeared to be an additional attempt at distancing his organisation from Metabiota, Garry told the Committee that Metabiota “has never been a partner company of the VHFC”. Nor, wrote Garry, “has Metabiota ever been a member of the VHFC”. This denial contradicts his own organisation’s press materials which, in July 2014, described their connection to Metabiota as a “partnership“.

Distancing his VHFC from Metabiota may be politic. Metabiota publications describe how Joseph Fair, a longtime Metabiota employee who worked at Kenema in 2013 and until mid-2014, was collecting virus samples, including Ebola, in the period prior to the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly known as Zaire) in Central Africa (Grard et al., 2011; Grard et al., 2012; Naccache et al., 2014). The funding for this project came from USAID (under the PREDICT programme and DARPA).

Such ties between Joseph Fair and sampling in Central Africa preceding the outbreak highlight the plausibility with which Zaire Ebola samples may have reached Kenema. Suitable storage facilities for dangerous viruses, meaning sites that are politically congenial, technologically competent, and electrically reliable are rare in Africa and Kenema may therefore have functioned as staging post for transporting samples back to the US.

Ian Lipkin and the COVID connection

Robert Garry’s Committee testimony has further significance. It re-opens the apparent connection between the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014 and COVID-19.

Garry was one of five authors of the controversial ‘Proximal Origin’ paper (Andersen et al., 2020, which dismissed the likelihood of a laboratory leak). Responding to a question on its authorship Robert Garry answered that Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier “did not make any significant contribution to the Proximal Origin paper that would have justified adding him as a co-author.”

Yet the committee also released a transcript of communications (via a platform called ‘Slack’) between four of the Proximal Origin authors (Andersen, Holmes, Garry, and Rambaut) which contains their scientific discussions of its text and content (see pages 988-1127). One co-author, Ian Lipkin, is absent from this Slack discussion. Apparently, Lipkin played a negligible role in writing Andersen et al. yet he was still included as a co-author.

This creates a mystery. What explains Lipkins’ inclusion when Fouchier was excluded? Ron Fouchier is a prominent practitioner of GOF research and vocal opponent of limits on it. His authorship, even if justified on other grounds, would, in many eyes, have compromised the apparent neutrality of the authors.

Lipkin, however, is a coronavirologist, which the other four Proximal Origin authors were not. It might reasonably have occurred to them that other virologists, especially coronavirologists, would wonder why such a critical paper on a coronavirus was written without a single coronavirologist contributing; this might have led to questions about its credibility and provenance.

This sequence, with Lipkin being included at the last minute as window-dressing, highlights a critical question. What, with their lack of coronavirology expertise (and total lack of furin cleavage expertise) qualified Holmes, Andersen, Garry, and Rambaut for inclusion in the COVID-19 origin discussion group assembled by Tony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar in the first place? And especially why, given their lack of expertise, did these authors end up writing the Proximal Origin paper?

Was it because these same individuals (Andersen, Holmes, Garry, and Rambaut) had already been involved in covering up the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014? Readers may recall that in the Ebola outbreak Bob Garry and Kristian Andersen ran the VHFC while Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rambaut co-authored the main phylogenetic studies (Dudas et al., 2014; Holmes et al., 2016; Quick et al., 2016; Dudas et al., 2017). These studies were critical in pinning the outbreak origin on Guinea when, as we have shown, Sierra Leone was an at least equally plausible site of emergence. Was Ebola 2014, in short, the precursor of COVID19?

References

Andersen, K. G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W. I., Holmes, E. C., & Garry, R. F. (2020). The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature medicine, 26(4), 450-452.

Dudas, G., & Rambaut, A. (2014). Phylogenetic analysis of Guinea 2014 EBOV Ebolavirus outbreak. PLoS currents, 6.

Dudas, G., Carvalho, L. M., Bedford, T., Tatem, A. J., Baele, G., Faria, N. R., … & Rambaut, A. (2017). Virus genomes reveal factors that spread and sustained the Ebola epidemic. Nature, 544(7650), 309-315.

Grard, G., Biek, R., Muyembe Tamfum, J. J., Fair, J., Wolfe, N., Formenty, P., … & Leroy, E. (2011). Emergence of divergent Zaire ebola virus strains in Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2007 and 2008. The Journal of infectious diseases, 204(suppl_3), S776-S784.

Grard, Gilda, Joseph N. Fair, Deanna Lee, Elizabeth Slikas, Imke Steffen, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, Taylor Sittler et al. “A novel rhabdovirus associated with acute hemorrhagic fever in central Africa.” (2012): e1002924.

Holmes, E. C., Dudas, G., Rambaut, A., & Andersen, K. G. (2016). The evolution of Ebola virus: Insights from the 2013–2016 epidemic. Nature, 538(7624), 193-200.

Naccache, S. N., Federman, S., Veeraraghavan, N., Zaharia, M., Lee, D., Samayoa, E., … & Chiu, C. Y. (2014). A cloud-compatible bioinformatics pipeline for ultrarapid pathogen identification from next-generation sequencing of clinical samples. Genome research, 24(7), 1180-1192.

Quick, J., Loman, N. J., Duraffour, S., Simpson, J. T., Severi, E., Cowley, L., … & Carroll, M. W. (2016). Real-time, portable genome sequencing for Ebola surveillance. Nature, 530(7589), 228-232.

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