June 8, 2021
Since the start of Covid, the mainstream media has displayed a complete lack of journalistic interest in its origin. Unquestioningly most accepted that Covid arose in nature. Anyone who disagreed was mocked, censored, accused of being a racist, and deemed a conspiracy theorist.
Early on in the pandemic, then-President Trump, Senator Tom Cotton, and a few other conservatives declared that a lab leak in China was possibly responsible for the Covid outbreak. No doubt this contributed to the media blackout, who are loath to allow Trump or conservatives credit for anything.
Despite the lack of curiosity, the evidence has become too great to ignore, forcing the media and the Biden administration to acknowledge the possibility that Covid leaked to the world from a medical lab in Wuhan, China.
The dearth of coverage on Covid’s origin is inexcusable because much circumstantial evidence has been known from the start of the pandemic.
Newly released emails reveal that Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top expert in infectious diseases, was warned in February 2020 that the coronavirus looked “engineered”. Yet, he, along with the left-leaning mainstream media, until recently, denied that this was even a possibility.
During a recent appearance on Fox News, Admiral Brett Giroir, former White House testing czar, stated that Dr. Fauci was dishonest when he said in May of 2020 that the virus could not have been “artificially or deliberately manipulated” from the Wuhan lab. According to Giroir “The statement from last year was completely false.”
Wuhan Institute of Virology and Gain of Function
If the media were honest purveyors of information without an agenda, all eyes should have been on the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) from the beginning of the pandemic. The WIV, China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory, is located within the center of the covid outbreak. Moreover, the WIV has ties to the Chinese Communist Party military, and scientists at WIV work with the world’s most deadly pathogens, including coronaviruses.
WIV researchers led by Dr. Shi Zheng-li, have been studying bat coronaviruses for years. Their work focuses on genetically engineering bat viruses to infect humans- also known as “gain of function”.
As reported last year by the Wall Street Journal, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), lead by Dr. Fauci, funded research at the WIV. Despite Dr. Fauci’s denials, the NIAID grant proposals prove that the WIV used the funds for dangerous gain of function research. As explained by former NY Times reporter Nicholas Wade, the NIAID proposals outline how Dr. Shi “set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells”- This is the very definition of gain of function research.
The NIAID funded research at the WIV between 2014- 2019. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, received the funds and then gave $833,000 of the $3.4 million NIAID grant money to the researchers at the WIV.
Further proof that gain of function research was performed at the WIV, according to Wade, in 2019 Daszak “gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.”
Lab Leak Theory
If Covid-19 was a natural occurrence it is hard to explain why a year and 1/2 after the pandemic began neither a SARS2 (also known as Covid-19) infected bat population, nor an intermediate animal host – an animal infected with the virus from bats and then spread it to humans- have ever been identified. And this is not for a lack of attempting to prove a zoonotic origin. Reportedly, China has tested over 80,000 animals.
Only months after the SARS1 epidemic in 2002 and the MERS epidemic in 2012, investigators found that a civet and camel, respectively, spread the viruses to humans. Wade explains that before making the jump to humans, pandemic viruses go through multiple mutations until becoming successfully infectious to humans. According to Wade-
“When you look for the fingerprints of a similar transition in SARS2, a strange surprise awaits. The virus has changed hardly at all, at least until recently. From its very first appearance, it was well adapted to human cells.”
This belies the natural occurrence theory but makes perfect sense if scientists engineered the virus in a lab.
It is also no secret that Dr. Shi and her colleagues performed their work on gain of function in coronaviruses at the level of a biosafety level 2 lab. This is the same level of safety used in a US dentist’s office. In 2018 US State Department inspectors who visited WIV sent two cables to the State Department warning about the potential threat to public health posed by the WIV.
An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by two medical experts provides smoking-gun evidence for the lab leak theory. In their professional observation, “the Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus”. They explain that, while the genomic sequence combination appearing in SARS2 has never occurred in nature, it is the sequence of choice used in laboratory work by gain of function researchers.
Adding to the significant evidence implicating the WIV as ground zero for SARS2, a US intelligence report revealed that three researchers from the WIV became sick with Covid-like symptoms, necessitating hospitalization in November 2019. The timing of their illnesses coincides with the Covid outbreak in Wuhan, China.
To date, China has not released the medical records of the sickened WIV scientists. But, they have: suppressed all records from the WIV, ordered laboratory samples destroyed, expelled reporters, closed down its databases of virus samples at the start of the outbreak, and arrested a whistleblower doctor who warned in January 2020 that the virus might be a form of SARS. These are not the actions of a country with nothing to hide.
Shedding light on why many dismissed the Wuhan lab theory out-of-hand, an expose in Vanity Fair describes the environment inside the US government for anyone asking questions about Covid’s origin as “politicized and hostile to open inquiries as any Twitter echo chamber.” The author added,
“The lab leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out of bounds.”
Infighting among government officials and public health experts was rampant. A memo uncovered by Vanity Fair reveals a State Department official warning other officials not to pursue an investigation into the origin of Covid because it will “open a can of worms”.
It appears that many in power were motivated to obfuscate the truth because of a conflict of interest. Implicating the WIV would also require placing blame on the US government and those involved with funding the lab- such as Dr. Fauci.
It is also undeniable that Democrats and the mainstream media were desperate to oust Trump from the presidency. Covid offered them a unique cudgel to take him down. Implicating China as the progenitor of Covid would have taken much of the onus off Trump. It may even have united our country against China, aiding Trump’s re-election. The Trump-hating partisans could not allow this.
With so much elapsed time, it is almost a certainty that China has destroyed most if not all of the evidence pointing to the WIV in the Covid outbreak. Disgracefully, as a result of derelict US government officials and the highly partisan liberal US media, we may never have definitive evidence to hold China to account.
