Published today (Monday 27th January, 2025) by Independent Science News: In Testimony, Robert Garry Declines To Rule Out That Researchers Brought Ebola To West Africa In 2014 by Jonathan Latham, PhD.
Synopsis: Back in June 2024 the Senate committee on the Origin of COVID-19 made its first and so far only investigative foray into the origin of the Ebola outbreak that ravaged West Africa in 2014. In its June hearing committee members questioned Prof. Bob Garry of Tulane University about his authorship of the infamous Proximal Origins paper on COVID-19; but afterwards they also submitted written questions. Most of these latter concern the Ebola 2014 outbreak which has attracted concern since it occurred far from the normal endemic range of Ebola virus, which is Central Africa. Bob Garry is intimately connected to that outbreak through his presidency of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC), a US non-profit with a research facility in Kenema, Sierra Leone. Research at Kenema is the primary suspect for being the ultimate source of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and now Garry’s answers have been released as part of the conclusions of the committee. What those answers do is to suggest how the spillover might have happened. He points the finger at another organisation that worked at Kenema in 2013 and 2014. It is the company Metabiota, whose employees I can reveal were sampling for human pathogenic viruses in Central Africa shortly before the outbreak.
