The Lab-Leak Theory And What We Know About The Cover-Up

Source: https://bit.ly/3pZQ5Nl

For more than a year after the onset of the pandemic, talking about
the possibility that the virus might have been lab-engineered was
taboo. Then, as the evidence continued to mount, it suddenly became
acceptable to talk about it in "respectable" circles. Today, however,
we appear to have gone full-circle: a determined effort is once again
underway to dismiss the lab-leak theory for good - even though no
new evidence has emerged to disprove it.
The Lab-Leak Theory And What We Know About The Cover-Up
Considering the endless ways in which the pandemic and our response
to it have changed the lives of every human being on the planet, it's
astonishing to consider how little is actually known about the
origins of the virus. Two and half years on, we are still very much
in the dark as to when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made
its appearance.
This isn't because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery
have proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been
systematically thwarted by the world's two most powerful governments:
America and China. This is the mother of all Covid conspiracy
theories - but it's also true.
One of the main "conspiracy theorists" is none other than Jeffrey
Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia
University, president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions
Network and chair of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission. He is not your
typical tinfoil-hat-wearing internet crank. Sachs recently
co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences calling for an independent inquiry into the virus's
origins. He believes there is clear proof that the National
Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary US public health agency,
and many members of the scientific community have been impeding
a serious investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in order to
cover up evidence that US-funded research in Wuhan may have
played a role in the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Many are convinced that the debate is settled, largely because almost
immediately a public narrative surrounding the origin of the virus
emerged. This held that the virus was zoonotic in nature, meaning
that it had jumped from one or more animals (probably, it was
argued, bats) to one or more humans, possibly through one or more
unidentified animal intermediate hosts, and most likely at the
Huanan Seafood Market  - even though there was no conclusive
evidence of any of this.
Early in the pandemic, an alternative theory emerged, suggesting
that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) - known, of all things,
for its research into SARS-related coronaviruses, and only eight
miles from the Huanan Seafood Market - might have had something
to do with an accidental outbreak. From a purely circumstantial
standpoint, and considering the long history of safety breaches
previously recorded at various facilities in China and throughout
the world, one could have been justified for considering it, at the
very least, a lead worth pursuing.
As Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, Europe's
biggest philanthropic research funding body, notes in his bestselling
book Spike: "It was odd for a spillover event, from animals to
humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly
in a city with a biolab … which is home to an almost unrivalled
collection of bat viruses" - especially with a new virus that "seemed
almost designed to infect human cells". If this were a coincidence,
he adds, it would be a "huge" one.
Yet from the beginning the very notion that the virus might have
a laboratory-based origin was stifled. The hot denials came not only
from the Chinese authorities and the Wuhan Institute of Virology
itself, but also from the WHO and leading Western scientists,
institutions and media organisations. For around a year and a half,
the "lab-leak" hypothesis was ridiculed and dismissed as a fringe
conspiracy theory and anyone who raised it deemed a crackpot
 - and even subject to censorship on Twitter and Facebook.
The mood seemed to shift when, beginning in mid-2021, several
high-profile Western scientists, intelligence officials and politicians
 - including President Joe Biden - started to acknowledge the
plausibility of a laboratory accident. Almost overnight, the lab-leak
scenario went from being a "crackpot theory" to a credible and
legitimate hypothesis. On the same day Biden announced that his
administration would be investigating the origins of Covid-19,
"including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected
animal or from a laboratory accident", Facebook stated that it
would "no longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made
or manufactured" from its apps.
More than a year later, there is simply no conclusive evidence of
whether the virus is zoonotic or artificial in nature - even though
the public narrative continues to be heavily skewed towards the
natural origin theory. What we do know, however, is that a massive
cover-up was orchestrated from the earliest days of the pandemic
by leading members of the scientific establishment and the Chinese
authorities.
This incredible story sheds light on several key aspects of the
entire pandemic management, something that Toby Green and I go
into in detail in our forthcoming book: the stifling of critical
opinion, the lack of transparency by public institutions, the deeply
unscientific manner in which the "scientific consensus" about many
aspects of the pandemic came about, and how some of the leading
actors of the pandemic tragedy - the WHO, Anthony Fauci, the
NIH, leading scientific journals - were already engaging in the
publication of papers which traduced the scientific method from
the very first days of the pandemic.
Here's a brief recap of what we know about the cover-up - much
of which we are aware of thanks to a series of Freedom of
Information Act (FoIA) requests.
Much of the work on SARS-like CoVs performed in Wuhan was
part of an active and highly collaborative US-China scientific
research programme funded by the US government - primarily
through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID), directed by Anthony Fauci, which is part of the NIH
 - and coordinated by the US-based non-governmental organisation
EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). The group's research work went beyond
the simple analysis of existing coronaviruses, and actually involved
the engineering of "chimeric" bat coronaviruses, some of which
proved to be potentially more infectious to humans - a highly risky
technique known as gain-of-function.
In 2018, EcoHealth and the WIV (in collaboration with other
institutions) sent a grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), which included a plan to insert furin
cleavage sites into existing bat coronaviruses - spots in the surface
protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. The
DARPA proposal was rejected - and yet the presence of a furin
cleavage site is precisely what sets SARS-CoV-2 apart from all
known SARS-like coronaviruses. Did the researchers carry out the
research anyway, possibly using other sources of funding? Nobel
Prize-winning virologist David Baltimore stated that he considered
this to be "the smoking gun for the origin of the virus".
In light of all this, it's hardly surprising that in the early days
of the pandemic, at the highest levels of the US establishment,
the question of whether the virus might have been engineered at
the WIV, possibly through research part-funded by the US government,
was taken very seriously. As a result of an FoIA request, we know
that on February 1, 2020, Anthony Fauci convened a "totally
confidential" conference call with at least a dozen high-level
experts from around the world, many of whom privately admitted
that there was a very high probability that the virus had been
artificially engineered and had then "escaped" from the Wuhan lab.
Yet not only did the NIH fail to disclose this to the public or to
Congress, but the emails released under the FoIA suggest that
it took an early and active role in promoting the "zoonotic
hypothesis" and the rejection of the laboratory-associated
hypothesis. Indeed, within days of the February 1 call, a group
of virologists, including some who were on it and had endorsed
the "artificial origin" theory, prepared the first draft of a hugely
influential paper on The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 -
subsequently published in Nature - that argued for the exact
opposite.
Moreover, the NIH has resisted the release of important evidence,
such as the grant proposals and project reports of EHA, and has
continued to redact materials released under FoIA, including
a remarkable 290-page redaction in a recent release. Even more
incredibly, at some point after March 2020 a number of early
SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences were deleted from the NIH's
own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.
The strangeness doesn't end here. In February 2020, an influential
letter signed by 27 global experts was published in The Lancet,
strongly condemning "conspiracy theories suggesting that
Covid-19 does not have a natural origin". The letter proved crucial,
alongside the aforementioned Nature paper, in nipping in the bud
the lab-leak hypothesis and giving the illusion of scientific
consensus. In late 2020, however, emails released following
a FoIA request showed that the Lancet statement had been orchestrated
by one of the 27 co-authors - none other than Peter Daszak, president
of EcoHealth Alliance. It was also revealed that all but one of the
other 26 scientists were linked to the Wuhan lab, their colleagues
or funders.
Daszak was first appointed in late 2020 as chair of the task force
created by the Lancet Covid-19 Commission with the aim of
establishing none other than "the origins of Covid-19"; and shortly
thereafter as the only US representative to a WHO fact-finding
mission to China tasked with the same goal. Unsurprisingly, both
task forces found that the virus was most likely zoonotic
(i.e., natural) in origin, and that transmission through a laboratory
incident was extremely unlikely.
The WHO report, in particular, came under heavy criticism, leading
to the establishment of a specific work group tasked with
ascertaining the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the Scientific Advisory
Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens, which published its
first preliminary report in June 2022. The results were inconclusive,
largely because "key pieces of data" from China were missing,
leading the WHO to recommend in its strongest terms yet that
a deeper probe was required into whether a lab accident may be
to blame. As we have seen, however, it's not only the Chinese
government that is covering up its tracks about its possible
involvement in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2 - but the American
one as well.
A new campaign is now underway to put the lab-leak theory to rest
once and for all. The recent publication of two new studies providing
more evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged into humans via the live
animal trade at the Huanan Seafood Market has led several outlets
to emphatically claim that "the Covid lab leak theory is dead", once
again misleading citizens into thinking that the debate is now really
settled.
But the studies don't provide any evidence that the virus didn't
escape from the Wuhan lab - they simply argue that it's not
a plausible scenario, also based on the fact that there's no evidence
that the virus was present at the WIV before the pandemic started.
But of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As
Sachs notes, "this [claim] is only as good as the limited data on
which it is based, and verification of this claim is dependent on
gaining access to any other unpublished viral sequences that
are deposited in relevant US and Chinese databases".
Ultimately, the virus may indeed be conclusively proven to be natural
in origin. But in order to do that, as Sachs stresses, a real
independent scientific investigation is needed. The public deserves
to be shown incontrovertible proof that the Wuhan lab has nothing
to do with all this - but that means that the US and Chinese
governments have to open up their lab records instead of going out
of their way to prevent a real investigation. Amid a time of
heightened geopolitical tensions and crumbling faith in political
leadership across the West, transparency is needed more than ever.
If we can't get this one right, how else can we be expected to place
our faith in authorities ever again?