In March 2020 he co-authored a letter in The Lancet urging "An objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2," arguing that there was "No scientifically validated evidence that directly supports a natural origin." More recently, Ebright was part of a panel testifying before Congress in August 2022 about gain of function research and oversight in a hearing led by Sen. Rand Paul.
Friday night, Ebright posted a Twitter thread of "Nine facts about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that everyone needs to know," and indeed, this information needs to be spread far and wide.
1) SARS-CoV-2 is related to bat SARS-like coronaviruses from southern China and northern Laos.
5) Wuhan has labs that, at the start of the pandemic, conducted the world's largest research program on bat SARS-like coronaviruses, possessed the world's largest collection of bat SARS-like coronaviruses, and possessed the world's only sample of a SARS-CoV-2-like coronavirus.
6) In 2016-2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology constructed a series of novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses that combined the spike gene of one bat SARS-like coronavirus with the rest of the genetic information of another bat SARS-like coronavirus and identified viruses that were able to infect and replicate efficiently in human airway cells and that had 10,000x enhanced viral growth and 4x enhanced lethality in mice engineered to display human receptors on cells.
7) In 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its collaborators proposed to construct an expanded series of novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses, this time using newly identified spike genes having affinities for human receptors that ranged from very low to very high; and proposed to insert furin cleavage sites - a feature that is present in SARS-CoV-2 but not in any of the hundreds of other known SARS-like coronaviruses and that is crucial for the high transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 - into SARS-like coronaviruses.
8) In 2016-2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology constructed and characterized SARS-like coronaviruses at biosafety level 2, a level inadequate for work with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and inadequate to contain a virus having the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2.
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