Follow the Science, page 26
In 2018, US State Department science diplomats visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). They said the lab’s research on bat coronaviruses was critically important. Yet they were so concerned about safety issues that they dispatched sensitive cables to Washington, DC, warning that what they observed posed a possible risk of starting a new respiratory virus pandemic. In April and July 2020, the Washington Post published some of the contents of the two-year-old cables, which shed additional light on problems discovered earlier at the Chinese lab.
As detailed in the documents, it took China eleven years to build the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Construction was finished on January 31, 2015, and the Chinese accredited the lab in February of 2017. It houses the highest-level biosafety lab, level 4, to research “among the most virulent viruses that pose a high risk of aerosolized person to person transmission.” Cables sent by US officials from the US Embassy in Beijing to Washington, DC, dated January 19, 2018, indicated, “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” According to the cables, the Wuhan lab also “has scientific collaborations” with the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston—once again, collaborations supported by taxpayer dollars through Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Further, the cables confirmed that NIAID and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had backed a five-year-long study on bat coronaviruses with communist Chinese scientists from the Wuhan lab, along with Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance.
After Dr. Redfield publicly leaned into the likelihood that Covid escaped from the Wuhan lab, Dr. Fauci began awkwardly spinning the news. “Obviously, there are a number of theories,” he opined. “So Dr. Redfield was mentioning that he was giving an opinion as to a possibility. But again there are other alternatives, others that most people hold by.” Once again, Dr. Fauci forgot to mention that he’d used our money to help pay for the very studies at issue. Instead, he steered the conversation away from anything that pointed to him or the Chinese lab. “This virus was actually circulating in China, likely in Wuhan, for a month or more before they were [sic] clinically recognized at the end of December of 2019,” Dr. Fauci said. “If that were the case, the virus clearly could have adapted itself to a greater efficiency of transmissibility over that period of time, up to and at the time it was recognized.”
I’ve found it’s never easy to pierce secrecy surrounding government health narratives. Dr. Fauci declined my interview requests. And, as usual, the federal government failed to lawfully respond to multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests I made for Dr. Fauci’s emails, which are public documents. As I’ve mentioned, under FOIA law, federal agencies must hand over requested documents within about thirty days. But after waiting more than a year, I’d received nothing. Same with my FOIA requests to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Baric, the researcher at the University of North Carolina, declined to speak with me, as did Daszak, the zoologist who leads EcoHealth Alliance. On Twitter, Daszak called the idea that Covid is connected to his research “rabbit hole conspiracies.” He added, “The same gang of right wing media outlets are also posting fraudulent claims about my work. Pure politics w/out a care for how this ultimately puts public health at risk.” See? It’s not Covid that put public health at risk. It’s all those pesky questions about how Covid came about.
And in case you had any doubt about how the clubby scientific community works, despite Daszak’s research partnership with Wuhan lab scientists, the World Health Organization invited him to help investigate the origins of Covid (in other words: himself)! That team, with Daszak’s input, issued a public report concluding it’s “extremely unlikely” the virus came from a lab.
Not everybody was snookered by the subterfuge. About 1,300 people signed a petition launched by independent scientists asking the World Health Organization (WHO) and EcoHealth’s Daszak to explain more about his research that was underway when the pandemic broke out. The petitioners didn’t get answers.
On April 27, 2020, the Trump administration took what seemed like a logical step. It canceled the remaining funding for EcoHealth Alliance research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). After all, the Chinese arguably cost many lives by blocking the Covid origin investigations that might have helped mitigate spread of the disease. But Trump’s decision to cut off money was met by a political backlash. Establishment scientists and their friends in the media insisted the move was irresponsible. Pretty soon, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reinstated the EcoHealth grant. But there were a few strings attached. For EcoHealth Alliance to get the cash, it would have to convince its Chinese partners to finally answer questions about the lab’s practices and the Covid outbreak, and provide a virus sample. Foul! cried EcoHealth Alliance and its allies. They claimed the conditions made research “impossible” because the Chinese would never agree.
Unbelievably, on August 27, 2020, it was announced that NIH had awarded an even larger grant of taxpayer money than before to EcoHealth Alliance: $7.5 million. EcoHealth Alliance was one of eleven institutions and research teams approved to receive an $82 million bundle of US tax money to study viruses crossing from nature into people and develop rapid-response strategies. Talk about throwing good money after bad! I cannot say with any certainty that this commitment of money amounts to a payoff to keep EcoHealth Alliance quiet about what it knows. But it’s reasonable to wonder. Congratulations! You failed so hard at preventing or mitigating the Covid pandemic, we’re rewarding you with even more money. In May 2024, after an embarrassing performance by Daszak two weeks earlier at a congressional hearing, the government finally decided to suspend federal grants to EcoHealth Alliance. Both Republicans and Democrats criticized EcoHealth for failing or delaying to properly report its high-risk studies.
True “Scientific Consensus”
If you take a little time and get beyond Google, Wikipedia, the CDC, the World Health Organization (WHO), public health officials, and establishment media, you’ll find there were many people unearthing the truth about Covid’s origins and gain-of-function research. Often, propagandists tried to claim that any authorities pointing to the Wuhan lab were “right-wing,” or Trump supporters. But many were not.
Take Jamie Metzl. He’s a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing. He served as deputy staff director of the Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Joe Biden on the National Security Council, and at the State Department under President Bill Clinton. In 2021, he told me that his own research into Covid’s origins had turned up many of the same answers as my research had revealed.
As part of my research, I consulted numerous scientific sources who’d established credibility with me in the recent past by proving to be accurate on key points of scientific debate. On the issue of sensitive US gain-of-function research with China, each one told me it should never have been allowed. One of the sources, a medical doctor, said it was “irresponsible” to “partner with China on how to make [coronavirus] more infectious.” Another, also a medical doctor and biodefense expert, said, “Hell, no, it’s not a good idea . . . [China has] an active bioweapons program, a very good one . . . and you’re going to cooperate with them on gain-of-function research? Somebody’s IQ dropped sharply when that decision was made.”
“There are scientists all around the world who have told me that they believe the most likely origin of Covid, of the pandemic, is an accidental lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Metzl tells me, yet another expert voice contradicting Dr. Fauci.
“What have you been told, and what have you found about scientists who feel like they can’t step forward?” I ask.
“Many of these people are afraid to step forward,” Metzl replies. “They’ve called it ‘career suicide,’ because there are so many contentious issues, because the stakes are so high. Because the Chinese government, in collaboration . . . with some very high-level and prominent scientists have put forward this story that I think is wrong.”
Metzl says Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance drove efforts to controversialize the mere asking about whether Covid could have come from a lab. And Daszak was part of the campaign to label reporting about it as “crackpot theories.”
“I have repeatedly called for Peter Daszak to be removed from the WHO Organized International Advisory Committee looking into the origins of the pandemic,” Metzl tells me. “And the reason why I have done so is Peter has a tremendous conflict of interest as someone who is, through his organization, the EcoHealth Alliance, a significant funder of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
As part of his investigations, Metzl uncovered a familiar tactic put to use to deflect scrutiny from China and its US supporters. The unseen hands of Daszak and his colleagues used medical journals to discredit the “lab theory.” They worked vigorously behind the scenes to orchestrate a letter published February 19, 2020, in the prestigious British journal Lancet entitled: “Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19.” Documents later obtained though Freedom of Information requests show that while Daszak was enlisting people to sign on to the Lancet statement, he sent emails urging that the statement should “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists.” As the science journalist Thacker later observed in The Disinformation Chronicle, Daszak was “moving behind the scenes to create this public outcry in the Lancet that anyone looking into a lab leak is a conspiracy theorist.”
The final Lancet letter read in part: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Daszak and the other signatories forgot to mention their own ties to the Chinese lab in question. And their letter was widely quoted in the press as evidence that Covid-19 had a natural origin. In a follow up article in The Guardian, Daszak calls the idea of lab origin for Covid a “crackpot theory.” Settled Science.
“This letter [in Lancet] was considered, at the time, very credible,” Metzl notes. “There were a number of Nobel laureates who signed it. And only later did it come out through a Freedom of Information request that the entire process had been managed and manipulated.”
An interesting postscript. Jacques van Helden is a professor of bioinformatics at Aix-Marseille Université (AMU) in Marseille, France, where he specializes in analyzing genomes and genome regulation, and is co-director of the Institut Français de Bioinformatique, which supports research in life sciences. Van Helden told Thacker that he contacted Lancet to urge them to publish his own letter refuting the Daszak-organized letter.
“I was told [by Lancet] our letter would be evaluated by a special committee on the virus origins,” he says. “This special committee has a president, and it is Peter Daszak.” Van Helden says he told the Lancet editor, “OK, but do you realize there may be a conflict of interest? He is the person who wrote the statement in the Lancet that we are saying was wrong . . . [The editor] didn’t answer that . . . they decided to uphold their position that [our] letter would not be considered [for publication].”
Let that sink in. The head of the special committee advising on Covid’s origin was a man whose research was implicated in Covid’s origin.
For her part, Shi, the “bat woman” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has been firm in her denial of anything to do with Covid-19, calling the virus “nature’s punishment on the human race.” “I swear on my own life that the virus has no connection with the laboratory,” Shi insisted in a statement. “To those people who believe in and are spreading the rumours perpetrated by third-rate media outlets . . . I would like to give this advice: Shut your dirty mouths!”
While some of us were busy following Covid’s trail, there appeared to be an organized effort to undercut any studies that supported the lab theory. Acting apparently in tandem, medical journals added an identical “editors’ note” to the inconvenient studies. Don’t believe what you’re about to read in this study, the editors’ note implies. This study doesn’t say what you think it says. The note, still appended to the studies today, reads: “We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”
More Manipulation
Email evidence released in 2022 and 2023 shows that Dr. Fauci, the head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, and the bat coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, also worked together to use medical journals to spin the public about Covid’s origins. They secretly weighed in on or helped direct publication of articles that pointed to a natural origin for Covid and resulted in deflecting from Covid research they funded or took part in with the Wuhan lab. Investigative science journalist Thacker, who reports on corruption in science and medicine, spoke with me about some of the emails. He says Drs. Fauci and Collins violated their own established ethics rules with their furtive acts.
By way of background, Thacker gives me an interesting bit of trivia about the beginnings of Fauci’s institute. “The thing you have to understand is that while it’s called the ‘National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,’ it’s actually a biodefense research institute housed within the National Institutes of Health,” says Thacker. “That’s not spoken about much today. . . . So what he really runs is a biodefense institute. . . . I think that if Anthony Fauci had been brought on television or in White House [Covid] briefings and had been identified as ‘head of biodefense research’ and not as ‘head of an Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,’ I think this would have created a different perception with the American public.”
So if we want to examine the existence of Covid from a biodefense perspective, the question becomes: How does one create a defensive weapon, such as a vaccine, against a biological agent that doesn’t yet exist? Answer: By creating that agent. As I’ve explained, that’s exactly what the US government and China did together with the gain-of-function research. “And so that creates this whole line of research in which we’re taking these viruses and ginning them up and making them more dangerous so that we can then create defensive countermeasures to them,” says Thacker.
As far as the US government’s explanation for why they were conducting the ill-advised research, it never made sense to me. At the 30,000-foot level view, it defies logic. How does it make any sense to invent a dangerous virus in the lab that may never come into existence on its own, in order to be prepared for it? What are the odds that even the best scientists in the world could accurately predict what would be the next virus that nature would unleash upon mankind, among the infinite possibilities? I’m not sure we’ll ever know the full story behind what was really going on.
In any event, when Covid broke out, most likely from the very Chinese lab the US had collaborated with and funded, the responsible parties went to great lengths to divert blame.
“We have a sequence for the virus that’s released January 11, 2020,” says Thacker. “We then see a series of [scientific] papers that come out that say it couldn’t have possibly come from a lab.” One was written and published in the journal Emerging Microbes and Infections. Emails later showed that the authors shared an advance draft of the article with the scientist leading the gain-of-function research in question: Baric.
“[Baric] edited their piece and then told them explicitly in an email, ‘I don’t want my name on this,’” says Thacker. An advance draft of the article was also shared with bat woman Shi. And her comments were incorporated. “They then published this piece without disclosing that there had been this secret editing by Ralph Baric and by Shi Zhengli,” says Thacker.
But wait! There’s more. There was also a letter called “Proximal Origin,” authored by five scientists and published in Nature in March 2020. It too claimed that Covid-19 couldn’t have come from a lab. And this letter bore the fingerprints of Drs. Fauci and Collins.
“What we know now is that the people who wrote [the “Proximal Origin” letter in Nature] initially were very concerned that [Covid-19] may have been engineered,” says Thacker. But then there was a fateful behind-the-scenes teleconference. Emails indicate the teleconference included Drs. Fauci and Collins, as well as Jeremy Farrar, who ran the Wellcome Trust–funded Oxford University Clinical Research Unit, a giant funder of biomedicine. After the teleconference, the authors of “Proximal Origins” began sharing multiple drafts with Fauci, Collins, and Farrar. The lead author, Kristian Andersen, thanks “Jeremy, Tony, and Francis” for their “advice and leadership” and ultimately sends them the accepted version of the manuscript, as well as a draft press release. Andersen asks the shadow advisors if they have “comments, suggestions, or questions about the paper or the press release.”
Thacker says that after input from Drs. Fauci and Collins, the article got a miraculous conversion. It said Covid-19 is natural and couldn’t have come from a lab. And after all that backdoor “advice and leadership,” the role of Fauci and Collins wasn’t even mentioned in the article. “After Francis Collins and Tony Fauci helped to orchestrate this piece and plant it in Nature, they then amplified it themselves,” says Thacker. “Francis Collins a couple weeks later writes about it . . . for his NIH director’s blog . . . no disclosure of . . . his advice and leadership on it. And Anthony Fauci discussed it in a White House briefing where President Trump was asked about ‘How did this pandemic begin?’ Tony Fauci steps up and says, ‘Oh well, we have this paper by these, you know, international virologists.’ No mention at all of his work behind the scenes to help to orchestrate that paper.”
