The Energy Department and FBI previously concluded that COVID-19 likely was leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Now, the London Sunday Times is reporting that COVID-19 was engineered by the Chinese military using US funding. The U.S. funding came through the EcoHealth Alliance, as critics of Anthony Fauci previously surmised.
This is quite a revelation. As Jamie Metzl notes, “COVID-19 was the greatest crime of the 21st century to date. Twenty million people are dead from a totally avoidable pandemic. It’s time for an international tribunal.”
This is not the only deadly virus to come from a Chinese lab. An earlier “Russian flu” that killed 700,000 also likely came from a lab leak in China. Yet, when people like evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein suggested the possibility that the virus leaked from a Chinese government lab in 2020, they were dismissed by the mainstream media as kooks. In February 2021, Facebook banned any mentions of the lab leak, following “consultations” with “the World Health Organization.” But the possibility was always obvious to experts. In private, Anthony Fauci and NIH officials worried about the possibility of a lab leak they publicly denied as a “conspiracy theory.”
Yet, in a fact-check it later retracted, PolitiFact gave a Tucker Carlson guest a “Pants on Fire” for the “debunked conspiracy theory” that COVID came from a lab. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace similarly claimed that “Donald Trump [is] turning his intelligence community to now investigate a conspiracy theory about COVID coming from a lab in Wuhan.” And when Republican Senator Tom Cotton suggested the virus came from a lab, the Washington Post similarly implied that it was a conspiracy theory, reporting that “Sen. Cotton (R-Ark.) repeated a fringe theory suggesting ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan.” A New York Times reporter dismissed the possibility of a lab leak, saying that the lab leak theory has “racist roots.” In 2020, the Associated Press dubbed the COVID-19 lab leak theory a debunked conspiracy theory.
As Hot Air’s David Strom notes,
The trail of money went, as we already know, from the NIH through the EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Chinese Military became involved in the coronavirus research around 2017 when gain-of-function research started bearing fruit. The Times’ report…is based upon confidential documents leaked to them by investigators who were sent to Wuhan to study the outbreak. It also comes directly from the United States State Department’s investigators who were sent to China to investigate the origins of the virus. There are extensive quotes from those State Department investigators.
The Times reports:
Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began.
Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.
The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.
As Strom observes, “The US had banned funding for gain-of-function research until the decision was reversed by Dr. Fauci, and the EcoHealth Alliance was enthusiastic about restarting their research into making viruses more lethal for research purposes. The whole point of gain-of-function research is to take benign viruses and make them dangerous and virulent, theoretically for research purposes. Apparently, the Chinese military felt the same way about gain-of-function research as the EcoHealth Alliance. Very enthusiastic indeed.”
The Times reports:
The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.
This information was thus confirmed by the State Department investigators.
The Times is not a sensational or anti-establishment paper, so this report is especially damning about the scientific establishment coming from it. As Strom notes, the Times “was very on board with COVID lockdown policies. It has endorsed [candidates of] both [of Britain’s two main political parties] over the years and actually endorsed Barack Obama for president. It is more establishment than ideological. In other words, the newspaper doesn’t have an axe to grind here and is not known for hyperbole to generate sales and clicks. This is the equivalent of the New York Times reporting that they have reviewed secret documents proving Joe Biden engaged in a bribery scandal–it would be an admission against interest.”
As the Times reports:
The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.
The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.
This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.
Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.
They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”
According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.
Surveys show most Americans already believe that the virus came from a lab leak, despite Anthony Fauci’s attempt to downplay this possibility. As Strom observes, “when virus experts warned Dr. Fauci that the virus looked engineered, he hastily arranged a conference call that pressured them to assert that the virus was natural. They did and were rewarded with $9 million in research grants.”
But the truth could not be hidden forever. State Department investigators uncovered a great deal of evidence that the Wuhan lab was involved, despite Chinese interference in the investigation, reports the Times:
They found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 — a month before the West became aware of the pandemic — and one of their relatives died.
An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
Separate analysis shows the centre of the initial outbreak of Covid-19, which has killed more than seven million people, was close to the institute’s laboratory, rather than at the city’s “wet” wildlife market as had been thought.
This is yet another example of key facts known to U.S. government investigators that have been persistently denied in public — signs of a massive coverup. As Strom observes, “The EcoHealth Alliance was known to skirt the US ban on gain-of-function research that was implemented by the Obama Administration. They worked diligently in Wuhan to engineer SARS-like viruses that did not infect humans into infectious variants, as well as manipulate a MERS virus found in camels into an infectious variant for humans.”
All of this was performed in labs with no more security than your typical dental office, judging from the Times report:
By 2017, according to a paper published by Shi, her scientists had sought to create eight mutant viruses from the Sars-like coronaviruses found in the Shitou cave. Two of the mutant viruses were found to infect human cells. Most of this work was carried out in the institute’s biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) laboratories, which took only light precautions that have been compared to those used in a dental surgery.
By contrast, the US guidelines require level 3 (BSL-3) precautions for similar work, including self-closing doors, filtered air and scientists equipped with full PPE while under medical supervision.
The US embassy found out about the experiments in Wuhan and sent diplomats with scientific expertise to inspect the institute in January 2018, according to diplomatic cables leaked to The Washington Post. They observed “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”….Around the same time, the Wuhan institute took another perilous leap forward with its work on the Shitou viruses. It began what Professor Richard Ebright describes as the most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken. The scientists selected three lab-grown mutant viruses, created by mixing Sars-like viruses with WIV1, which had all been shown to infect human cells. These mutants were then injected into the noses of albino mice with human lungs.
The aim was to see whether the viruses had the potential to spark a pandemic if they were fused together, as they might do naturally in a bat colony. The original WIV1 virus was injected into another group of mice as a comparison.
The mice were monitored in their cages over two weeks. The results were shocking. The mutant virus that fused WIV1 with SHC014 killed 75 per cent of the rodents and was three times as lethal as the original WIV1. In the early days of the infection, the mice’s human-like lungs were found to contain a viral load up to 10,000 times greater than the original WIV1 virus.
Despite this damning situation, which Anthony Fauci helped contributed to with his funding decisions, Fauci was in a position to conceal the facts and downplay their implications for government COVID policy. As the Times reports:
The experiment’s results suggested the new lab-made virus would be more difficult to stop if it leaked into the population, according to Ebright. It appeared to be highly infectious early in the illness.
The researchers’ tests also showed vaccines and other treatments developed to combat Sars were not effective against the new virus. The results of the experiment were not shared with other scientists in any scientific journal or paper.
The experiment was part-funded by EcoHealth’s grant money, but the FOI documents show that, while the Wuhan institute’s experiments were described in Daszak’s April 2018 annual progress report to the NIH, he did not refer to the deaths of the humanised mice.
There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice.
As Strom observes, it was a major lapse for Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance to omit mentioning this when they sought more funding from the U.S. government. And Daszak’s excuses for his misleading claims don’t square with what he already knew at the time, judging from the Times report, which observes that:
Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement.
As Strom observes, this is one “of Anthony Fauci’s pet projects. Fauci was deeply connected to the EcoHealth Alliance and was one of its great fans,” failing to see downsides that others apparently could see. “In fact, when the Alliance looked for funding from the US government that didn’t come from NIAID, they weren’t so lucky. DARPA turned them down when they requested a bigger chunk of change than the NIH could easily provide. Not everybody shared Fauci’s good opinion of the organization.”
As the Times reports:
By March 2018, the Wuhan institute was keen to press ahead with more experiments. Daszak applied for more funding from the US. He made a pitch for $14 million over three years from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is responsible for emerging technology for use by the military.
The application, entitled Defuse — which names Daszak, Shi and Baric — proposed the Wuhan laboratory find large numbers of new Sars viruses and mix some of them with their two deadly strains from the Shitou cave — WIV1 and SHC014 — to see what would happen. Darpa declined to fund the research.
One specific experiment involved inserting a furin cleavage site, a tiny section of a virus’s genetic order that makes them more infectious, into the pathogens. Daszak and the Wuhan laboratory say they did not go ahead with the work. But when Covid-19 emerged the following year, it was notable for being the first Sars-like coronavirus with a furin cleavage site.
As Strom points out, the furin cleavage site is the primary impetus for virologists’ argument that the virus looked man-made. “Their observation is what led to that original panicked conference call and the apparent bribes to change their stories. It seems quite the coincidence that COVID-19 is the only coronavirus with such a site and that the EcoHealth Alliance’s goal was to create a coronavirus with a furin cleavage site.”
State Department researchers who were sent to Wuhan to investigate the origins of COVID learned how the virus was engineered, notes The Times:
The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
The investigators also saw evidence that the institute was conducting “serial passaging” experiments on at least one of the mine viruses. This is a process in which lab animals are infected with viruses and monitored to see which strain is harmful to their health. The most damaging strain is selected for repeat experiments to encourage the pathogens to mutate into something more deadly.
The investigators spoke to a Wuhan institute insider who alleged serial passaging experiments were being carried out on RaTG13. “Humanised mice with the serial passaging is a toxic combination,” said a source. “It speeds up the natural mutation process. So instead of taking years to mutate, it can take weeks or months. It guarantees that you accelerate the natural process.”…
Quay believes Covid-19 was created by inserting a furin cleavage site into one of the mine viruses and then serial passaging it through humanised mice. He submitted a statement to the US Senate explaining the process. “You infect the mice, wait a week or so, and then recover the virus from the sickest mice. Then you repeat. In a matter of weeks this directed evolution will produce a virus that can kill every humanised mouse.”
This explains why from the beginning of the outbreak, he says, the pandemic virus was so remarkably well adapted to infect humans.
Apparently, the Chinese military desired a bioweapon, judging from the Times report.
One of the reasons there is no published information on such work, according to all three investigators, is because the shadow project on the mine viruses at the Wuhan institute was being funded by the Chinese military.
The State Department investigators wrote in their report: “Despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016.
The upshot of all this, notes Strom, is “the evidence that COVID was engineered in Wuhan with funds from the United States and the Chinese military is overwhelming. The US has known this for years, and there is plenty of documentation to build a clear line from the discovery of bat coronaviruses in a mine–viruses that were similar to SARS, but didn’t infect humans. A furin cleavage site was inserted, and then a program to mutate the virus into a deadly form. All were done in a lab with biosafety level 2. The State Department investigators sent to determine what happened were stonewalled by China, but developed a chain of evidence that pretty conclusively demonstrates that this was done. There is no animal reservoir for the virus as it exists now, despite lots of smoke and mirrors suggesting otherwise.”
Yet, many in the media dismissed the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak as a “conspiracy theory” because Trump was talking about it, notes a Washington Post reporter.
Government-funded disinformation blacklists also gullibly accepted Chinese government claims that there had been no lab leak, calling the idea of a “Chinese cover-up” racist “disinformation.” The London-based Global Disinformation Index, which has received taxpayer money from the U.S. and foreign governments, supplies advertisers and advertising agencies with a list of web sites to avoid. In a July 2020 report, GDI treated the concept of a “Chinese cover-up” or COVID resulting from a “lab experiment” as “COVID-19 disinformation” that caused “real-world harms,” such as harms to “specific groups” based on “race.” It complained that “ads for big brands have been found” next to “stories that…traffic in theories that the Chinese government … should be blamed for the virus’ spread,” treating that as disinformation.
The discussion of a Chinese cover-up that GDI falsely branded as “disinformation” was common on conservative web sites, many of which were given bad ratings by GDI. Virtually all of the news outlets given bad ratings by GDI were either conservative, or pro-free-market (such as libertarian Reason Magazine, which was critical of lockdowns and treated the lab leak as a possibility. GDI gave Reason a bad rating, even though it has won journalism awards, and a journalism-standards entity gave Reason a perfect score).
GDI often treats criticism of the government or progressive policies as an “adversarial narrative” that amounts to disinformation, even when it is factually true.
GDI compiles a blacklist — a “dynamic exclusion list” — that it feeds to advertising agencies and big corporations. One of the largest ad agencies, Xandr, told companies last year that it was using GDI’s “exclusion list.” Xandr recently stopped using the blacklist after a public outcry. Former State Department official Mike Benz said that the impact of these blacklists on conservative news outlets is “devastating.”
