Today, “The New York Times published an op-ed blasting scientists and government officials for covering up evidence that COVID-19 likely originated from a gain-of-function lab leak. Five years too late. The piece condemns Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Jeremy Farrar, Kristian Andersen, the authors of the Proximal Origin paper, and EcoHealth Alliance for publishing deceptive studies labeling the lab leak theory a conspiracy, even while privately admitting: ‘The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.’ The op-ed delivers an ominous warning: This ongoing cover-up and denial mean that dangerous gain-of-function experiments, the exact kind of research that likely created COVID-19, are still happening right now in inadequately secured labs, quietly endorsed by the scientific establishment. It’s not a question of if, but when, the next deadly virus escapes. Remember when the NYT would call you a misinformation spreader, and social media platforms would ban you for believing COVID-19 originated in a lab?,” notes Kanekoa The Great.
British and German intelligence recognized early in the pandemic that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, but this was kept secret from the public even as leading journalists claimed that it was a racist to suspect a lab leak. “Back in 2021, the Times’ lead COVID reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, not only dismissed the possibility the bug escaped from the Wuhan lab but suggested such claims were racist: ‘Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots,’ she tweeted.” But before she made this claim, multiple intelligence agencies had concluded that the virus had leaked from a lab. In March 2020, Britain’s “spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility,” reports the London Daily Mail. But that conclusion was kept secret, even though it stated: ‘It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.'” Similarly, in early 2020, German Intelligence “concluded with 80 percent to 95 percent certainty that the virus had in fact leaked from a Chinese lab.” But German Chancellor Angela Merkel kept this secret.
As is explained in an op-ed in today’s New York Times,
Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap…Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market…To promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax…
The next pandemic is only an accident away. Check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk….the scientists did all this under [lax] “BSL-2 plus” conditions…If just one lab worker unwittingly inhaled the virus and got infected, there’s no telling what the impact could be on Wuhan, a city of millions, or beyond it, the world…You’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research. Why haven’t we learned our lesson?…
Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a novel coronavirus related to ones found in bats and researchers soon noticed the pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan researchers had once proposed inserting into bat coronaviruses…A March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists…declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately, many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, privately wrote, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
Spooked, the co-authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his own book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci…The scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic. Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied….The paper’s lead authors discussed how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak….David Morens, a senior scientific adviser to Fauci at N.I.H., wrote to [EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter] Daszak that he had learned how to make “emails disappear,” especially emails about pandemic origins. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote.
In America, it was not until 2023 that the Energy Department and the FBI publicly stated that COVID-19 likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory. The London Sunday Times later reported 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.
