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The Ebola outbreak of 2014 was a disaster for West Africa. Over 11,000 lives were lost amidst intense negative social and economic consequences. It is today commonly cited as a bona fide example of a natural zoonosis -- but the evidence doesn't hold up: https://t.co/sckkJ6Yo0y

Africans who charged that the outbreak had lab origin were dismissed. Scientists they accused were the loudest in dismissing the possibility of lab origin for Covid. Were the Africans right all along? See and overview -- and connections to Covid https://t.co/sckkJ6XQb0

Robert Garry of Tulane University and Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research are president and VP of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium, based in Kenema, Sierra Leone. Politifact asked Garry about charges from Africans that his lab might have been responsible for the outbreak.

Garry claimed: “We were there working 10 years and then Ebola came here.”

But on August 25, 2013, just months before the Ebola outbreak, the VHFC posted on its website an article titled that indicated otherwise.

The article was headlined: “Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute make major advances in the fight against Ebola virus.” This article is no longer on their website, but we retrieved the headline from WayBackMachine. https://t.co/tBxNrSNWUy

The dominant narrative -- that a small child playing with bats caused the devastating outbreak, was put forward by Fabian Leendertz of the Robert Koch Institute, Berlin. But if you examine the paper, the facts don't back their confidence pronouncements.

They could find no Ebola among the bats in the area, that there was no mass die-off of surrounding mammal wildlife as with past Ebola outbreaks, which took place thousands of miles away. ... See details in the full article: https://t.co/RfrQCEPjKm ...

Also, the child in question, according to several sources, including his father, was actually 18 months old when he died and too young to be playing with bats. Leendertz was a member of the WHO team, with Peter Daszak, that reported, in March 2021, on the origins of COVID-19. ...

Eric Lander is the most famous of the authors of the phylogenetic papers which attempt to place the origin of the outbreak just over the border in Guinea and away from Sierra Leone where the U.S. labs are located. Latham scrutinized these claims and found them wanting...

Lander is on leave as president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He was forced to resign as Biden's science advisor early this year following charges of bullying.

Pardis Sabeti, board treasurer of VHFC, is a member of the Broad Institute...

On Oct. 17, 2014, Obama named Klain “Ebola czar”. The same day, the White House instituted a “pause on funding for any new studies that include certain gain-of-function experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses.” Klain is now Biden chief of staff...

Metabiota, was a VHFC partner in 2014. MSF’s (Doctors Without Borders) emergency response coordinator was highly critical of the biosafety measures used by Metabiota at Kenema, stating: “I didn’t go inside the Metabiota lab…I refused because I had already seen enough.” ...

WHO Ebola coordinator stated Metabiota staffers “are systematically obstructing” attempts to track the outbreak. MSF would also charge there was a “hidden outbreak in Sierra Leone”...

This raises the question of whether Metabiota’s seeming bungling was actually part of a coverup to obscure the outbreak’s origins in Sierra Leone by obstructing reporting from there....

In addition, other member of the VHFC charged Metabiota of culturing cells from Ebola patients after the outbreak, which they insisted was dangerous and should “be stopped immediately.”...

Since 2014, Metabiota has received funding from Google Ventures, the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, USAID's PREDICT program and Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, apparently while Hunter Biden was a managing partner, causing headlines...

It also caused headlines when the Russian Ministry of Defense accused it of involvement in biolabs in Ukraine. It also has a relationship with In-Q-Tel -- the CIA's venture capital project. https://t.co/Ic9ZAMSPjP

One of the primary sources for this was the writings of Chernoah Bah at @africanistpress -- he wrote the book "The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa" --

The kicker is that Garry and Andersen -- the heads of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium -- were the two most vocal of the signers of the Nature Medicine article “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” which was widely used to dismiss the possibility of lab origin.