Covid-19 Wuhan Lab Origin: No Longer a "Racist Conspiracy Theory"

Since the Covid pandemic emerged from Wuhan, China, would it not have been logical to first look for its causes at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which was experimenting with coronaviruses?

In September 2020, virologist and former University of Hong Kong postdoctoral fellow Dr. Li-Meng Yan told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that solid scientific evidence can be presented for the SARS-CoV-2 virus not to be of natural origin. "This virus is like Frankenstein. Basically a cow has a deer's head, rabbit's ears and also has monkey's hands. You can never get it from nature," she said. Asked by Tucker why no one was talking about it, Li-Meng said they were afraid – the Chinese communist government and their friends in the scientific world were busy suppressing the fact.

To the wider public, such a claim rang surely as a surprise. The accepted version of the story at the time was that the virus had originated in the Huanan wildlife market in Wuhan, China, where a virus that had hitherto been prevalent among bats, and which we had henceforth not suspected to be a threat for us, had somehow jumped to humans via another species. A quick 'fact-check' was carried out on Li-Meng's claims by the well-known US fact-checking portal Politifact, and the result said that Li-Meng's story was a lie of the strongest kind – “pants on fire”, they rated it. Just over six months later, the fact-checkers retracted their opinion – in May 2021, they admitted that the claim about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 was still in dispute.

Li-Meng was not, of course, the first to claim the virus had originated in a laboratory. In fact, it was suspected from the outset by a number of experts as well as simply logical people. As early as April 2020, for example, the now-deceased Nobel Prize-winning French virologist Luc Montagnier said that the most likely source of the virus was a laboratory in Wuhan.

The question of the origin of the virus is also important in itself, because if we don't know the root cause of the pandemic, how can we do anything differently next time to prevent its outbreak?

US Congress investigates

On March 8 this year, Jamie F. Metzl was giving his statement before the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Metzl is neither a doctor nor an expert on viruses, but is an analyst of geopolitics and international relations, has held key foreign policy positions under US President Bill Clinton, and is the author of books on the future of humanity and a science fiction novel. In his testimony before Congress, he explained how he had realised from the start of the pandemic in 2020 that a lab leak was a clear possibility for the release of the virus and should certainly be seriously investigated.

Jamie F. Metzl was saying from the very beginning that we should look for the origin of the SARS-Cov-2 in the Wuhan lab. Foto: Wikimedia Commons.

Metzl pointed out that it was clear quite early that the particular SARS virus had not originated in the subtropical regions of southern China, northern Laos or Burma, where bats carrying similar viruses are found. It had originated more than 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan in central China, and this, according to Metzl, was critically important in the discussion of the case and should not have been so easily dismissed for expediency or political considerations. "Wuhan may not have had these horseshoe bats, but it did have multiple laboratories and institutes working on SARS-like viruses and the world’s largest collection of coronaviruses," Metzl said. In addition, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had only recently been carrying out various studies and genetic modification experiments with SARS viruses, and at the same time had had problems meeting safety requirements.

Robert R. Redfield, a physician and virologist who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during President Donald Trump's administration from 2018 to 2021, i.e. including the beginning of the pandemic, also testified at the same congressional hearing. His view, too, from the very beginning, was that all theories about the origin of the virus must be investigated. "Based on my initial analysis of the data, I came to believe—and still believe today—that it indicates COVID-19 infections were more likely the result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event," he said.

Robert R. Redfield, standing behind Donald Trump, was the director of the CDC 2018-2021. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

In reality, many analysts and experts were immediately convinced that the story of the Wuhan Huanan market as the origin of the virus was nonsense. But how was it possible to effectively kill off any talk of laboratory leakage as a possibility? For a long time, the rule was that, when it was talked about, the response was a barrage of articles – and not only 'fact-checks' – claiming it was a conspiracy theory. A number of authors even expressed a view that the so-called lab leak theory was "unbearably racist". For a while, Facebook put a ban on posts talking about the possibility of a lab leak.

Comedian accused of racism

In June 2021, renowned broadcaster, producer and comedian Jon Stewart made a joke about the lab leak on the Stephen Colbert-led CBS “The Late Show”. "There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China, what do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab," he said. He later recalled that he was called racist towards Asian people and right-wing extremist because of the joke.

The politicisation of the issue was clear in Stewart's criticism – he was, after all, unexpectedly hit by criticism from left-wing Democrats, i.e. from within his own camp. The reason why the left wing was so aggressive in opposing the possibility of a lab leak was that in the spring of 2020, the then President Trump was talking about it. In the last days of Trump's presidency in January 2021, the US government also published a detailed fact sheet on the virus tests at the Wuhan lab, noting the sickness of lab workers there since as early as the autumn of 2019, i.e. before the first 'official' cases in the city. Nonetheless, the lab leak was still labelled a MAGA-Republican theory, which all Democrat-Progressives opposed as such.

However, the real discrediting of the theory of a laboratory leak as a possible origin of the virus did not stem from anti-Trump progressives, but because of what Li-Meng referred to in September 2020 – the need for some influential people in scientific circles to deny it.

Silencing the lab leak hypothesis

In March 2020, five renowned scientists published an article in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on the origin of SARS-Cov-2, confirming that the analyses they had carried out showed it was not a laboratory-created or manipulated virus. This was a very influential piece of work in the early phase of the pandemic, which was also presented in an online post by Francis Collins who was the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US at the time. In April 2020, the same study was referenced by Anthony Fauci – the White House coordinator of coronavirus policies and the very “face” of the US pandemic policy – who, back then, headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), formally part of the NIH. Their mention of this scientific article can be considered anything but accidental.

It was later learnt from correspondence between Fauci and Collins that the former had called the lab leak "a shiny object that will go away in time".¹⁶

Big money for the right "science"

The authors of the article in Nature Medicine had, in fact, initially taken the opposite view and informed Fauci and Collins about it. One of the scientists, Danish evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote to Fauci in early February 2020 that the virus had "some of the features (that potentially) look engineered". However, after some discussion with Fauci, Collins and other influential figures, they changed their minds and confirmed this in an article they later published. Between 2020 and 2022, the same researchers received a $25.2 million worth of grants from the NIH for their research projects.

If the logical conclusion to be drawn in this case is that it is highly likely that the initially critical scientists got stuffed with money and were made to tell a different story and fib, then this is not an isolated case of outright obfuscation on this issue. In fact, an even more significant example is a public letter by 27 respected scientists, published in March 2020 in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet. "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," the renowned virologists and medical experts wrote. As the signatories were indeed prominent figures considered to rank at the top of their scientific field, this in itself began to work as an argument against all those who spoke of the possibility of a lab leak, and each subsequent fact-check turned the article into a club to hurl at sceptical people.

The fact that 26 out of the 27 signatories had direct links to the same Wuhan research lab – in other words, had a blatant conflict of interest, yet interestingly enough were not at all ashamed not to disclose the fact at the onset – only came to light much later.

Fauci himself gave a grant for “gain-of-function” research

What's more, the letter's organiser, British zoologist Peter Daszak and the Fauci gang, had the most reason to deny the possibility of a lab leak. Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organisation that calls itself an organisation protecting wildlife and public health from the emergence of diseases.

Peter Daszak is the president of the EcoHealth Alliance. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

It was with funding from this organisation that a coronavirus project was carried out in Wuhan, which involved gain-of-function research to make the virus contagious to humans. EcoHealth also submitted an application in 2018 to The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the US Army's research agency for the development of military technologies. It explicitly asked for a funding for a project aimed at manipulating the bat-derived SARS coronavirus so that it could infect humans. DARPA decided not to fund this project.

That doesn't mean, however, that EcoHealth wasn't already doing it for the US taxpayers’ money. The NIH had been funding their research projects through its Fauci-led NIAID since 2014, with a total of $3.1 million to support risky gain-of-function experiments with the bat-derived coronaviruses. This means the tests on the virus were already under way and were carried out in the same Wuhan laboratories. NIH renewed its funding in 2019.

That it was these lab experiments that led to the pandemic, was noted by a former EcoHealth vice-president Andrew Huff in his book.

Why didn't the WHO find anything?

Reading this, it may seem comical that the same EcoHealth CEO Daszak was part of the World Health Organisation (WHO) expert team that in February 2021 tried to identify the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In their conclusion, the WHO experts said a laboratory origin of the virus was "extremely unlikely" and Daszak, interviewed on camera, said attention was to be paid to the supply chains at the Huanan market, which was still being presented as the site of the virus’ outbreak. Daszak described the cooperation with the Chinese as characterized by "trust" and "openness".

However, some members of the same expert group said the Chinese denied them access to the necessary data.

In this context, the reactions of Fauci, as the financier of these experiments, in May and July 2021 in the United States Congress, answering questions from Senator Rand Paul, are not surprising. In May, Fauci had literally lied that the NIH had not funded coronavirus gain-of-funcion research projects in Wuhan. When Senator Paul recited the whole story about these experiments and the role of Fauci and the NIH in funding them in July, all the angry Fauci could say in the end was that Paul had no idea what he was talking about.

That same summer, in response to Senator Paul's criticisms, Fauci also uttered his famous line in a television interview, that criticizing him was in fact "criticizing science".

Conspiracy theory becomes theory

While the attempts by Fauci and his comrades to discredit the lab leak as a conspiracy theory continued, the situation had changed compared to 2020. In May 2021, a group of scientists wrote an open letter to the journal Science, calling for an investigation of all the possible hypotheses about the origin of the virus.

In the second half of May 2021, The Wall Street Journal wrote that three researchers at the Wuhan lab fell ill and had to be hospitalised in November 2019, shortly before the virus outbreak began – another clear indication of the lab as the source of the virus, as the outbreak in the Huanan market occurred only later.

In late May, US President Joe Biden instructed the intelligence agencies to find out whether the lab leak could be a fact. Biden, too, was reported to be now engaged in justifying Trump's racism.

According to a report published in October 2021, four of the five intelligence agencies were more inclined to support the theory of natural animal-to-human transmission of the virus. Only the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cited a lab leak as the cause of the pandemic, accrediting the theory with "moderate confidence" – but said the leak had to be accidental. The intelligence community broadly concluded that the virus causing Covid-19 was not deliberately engineered in a lab, but that was said only with low confidence.

In May 2022, Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist who chaired The Lancet's Covid-19 Commission, wrote in a collaborative article with Neil L. Harrison, professor of anesthesiology and molecular pharmacology, that the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus required independent investigation.

Jeffrey D. Sachs chaired the Covid-19 Commission of The Lancet. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Elekes Andor.

In February of this year, the US Department of Energy came out with its findings – like the FBI, they attributed the outbreak of the virus to a lab leak.

In March and April, the Subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee investigating the origins of the coronavirus heard from different witnesses at two separate hearings. It was broadly agreed upon at these public hearings as well that since no one had been able to prove the lab leak with full certainty, the matter should be investigated further. At the same time the hearings, in the face of of various witnesses, draw a roughly similar picture of the potential scenario as put forward here.

In June this year, reports also emerged alleging that scientists in Wuhan were carrying out risky experiments with viruses in collaboration with the Chinese military.

Perhaps the bottom line is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which researches coronaviruses, is the place to go for answers about the origin of the virus. This was understood from the onset by all logically minded people who delved into the subject. This possibility was denied by those who were somehow involved in the work of the Institute, wished to conceal what was being researched in its laboratories or stood to gain greatly from denial. The deniers, including influential pandemic policymakers, managed, with the help of the press, 'fact-checkers' and social media censors, to label those who spoke of the lab leak as racist conspiracy theorists and to create such confusion in public opinion that, to this day, a large number of people believe that the Huanan market in Wuhan, where the bat virus jumped to humans through a never-established intermediary host, was the origin of the virus.