Investigative journalists at The Sunday Times attempted to piece together all the old and new evidence pointing toward the controversial lab leak theory to uncover the true origins of COVID-19, and, reviewing hundreds of confidential documents produced by the ongoing investigations, they published their findings last week in the most thorough report on the subject to date. Their tale is one of incredible hubris and deadly carelessness, where no character is without blame for everything that transpired.
What began as a conspiracy theory—as officials worldwide tried to contain both the pandemic and all information that didn’t fit their chosen narrative—three years later has become foundational in the historic record. It’s clear that COVID originated from a virology lab in Wuhan, and not from a wet market mere miles away from the shadowy facility. What’s unclear though is how we reached that point where scientific carelessness unleashed a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ pandemic and, as a result, restricted the health and freedom of billions, while serving the interests of politicians and enriching the pharmaceutical companies.
Regardless of who took advantage of the situation or how it was done, the least we can do is understand how the pandemic truly began. Luckily, The Sunday Times did just that, and they deserve all the credit. I encourage everyone interested in the fine details to read the massive report themselves. Here, I will only summarize the major points that the journalists at the Times uncovered.
Wuhan, EcoHealth, and Sars
The story starts with the 2002 SARS outbreak in the Chinese province of Guangdong, which infected 8000 people in 29 countries but killed less than 800. Although not even close to the magnitude of the COVID crisis, the whole world took notice, especially because until then, coronaviruses were thought to be relatively harmless. As soon as it turned out that some of them aren’t, China began a research program into coronaviruses carried by bats with the aim of identifying dangerous strains and developing vaccines. The program was given to Dr. Shi Zengli and—you guessed it—the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Because this was not long after 9/11 and bioterrorism (among all forms of terrorism) suddenly became a relevant threat in the West, Shi was soon joined by the British-American bat expert, Dr. Peter Daszak, who led the New York-based non-profit Wildlife Trust, which was given significant American funding to explicitly focus on how viruses can jump from animals and humans, especially those with pandemic potential.
Shi provided the labs and the fieldwork, Daszak brought the money and conducted the experiments. The operation was dramatically upgraded in 2009, when the trust—it was to be renamed ‘EcoHealth’ in due time—was granted $18 million to identify future pandemic viruses, under the program named Predict. Daszak showed his gratitude to his Chinese colleagues by redirecting $1 million of the Predict fund to the Wuhan lab.
Gain-of-function epidemic
While Daszak was paid to find out what he could in China, the truly cutting-edge experiments were conducted back in the U.S., by the virologist Ralph Beric of the University of North Carolina. From the mid-2000s, Beric was working on creating a universal vaccine for SARS-like viruses, and doing so involved mixing certain pathogens, enhancing their potency, and testing their effect on genetically modified, ‘humanized’ mice. In other words, gain-of-function research.
By the mid-2010s, however, the public pressure to cease gain-of-function programs was too big to ignore in the U.S., until President Obama announced a general moratorium on the practice to ensure public safety. However, the decision came after the Wuhan lab had teamed up with Beric to borrow one of his ‘designs’—an enhanced coronavirus spike gene—and combine it with the original SARS to create a new virus that was branded by him and Shi as a “potential mass killer” in 2015.
By this time, EcoHealth was booming, and just received another $3.7 million from the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) a year before, half a million of which would go directly to the Wuhan Institute. This grant allowed Daszak and Shi to continue evolving Baric’s initial creation in China, relying on legal loopholes after the U.S. banned their type of research.
By 2017, the Wuhan lab was able to produce a mutant virus that killed 75% of the humanized mice it was exposed to. Freedom of information (FOI) documents show that Daszak knew well enough that this result was not something he’d want to advertise if he wanted to keep his position, so he simply omitted the deaths of the mice from his annual progress report to the NIH, saying that the rodents showed only “mild” symptoms. In 2018, he applied for another $14 million from DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), which—as far as we know—was declined.
China’s shadow project
Meanwhile, happy to take American money and expertise, the Chinese were running their own secret gain-of-function project behind the curtains, keeping the NIH and even Daszak and EcoHealth in the dark. All at the orders of Beijing, of course, and the direct involvement of the Chinese military.
As more recent investigations from the U.S. State Department uncovered, the Chinese found a particularly dangerous strain of coronavirus from a previously unknown lineage in the Mojiang copper mine in 2012 after six miners died while being exposed to it. Over the next three years, Dr. Shi’s team extracted over 1,300 samples from the mine, all while keeping the discovery—and the miners’ deaths—a total secret from their American colleagues working with them in Wuhan.
Among the strains uncovered in Mojiang were the nine viruses which were the only members of COVID-19’s lineage prior to the pandemic, and the one most closely related to it—dubbed later as RaTG13—had become the main subject of Shi’s parallel research. It used “directed evolution” to speed up the natural mutation of the virus, making it deadlier and more transmissible at a highly accelerated pace. All while engaging in the exact methods Daszak proposed to DARPA in the rejected grant application.
Even before the American money was starting to dry out, the funding of the shadow project was taken up entirely by the Chinese military (PLA), which was working together with the Wuhan lab on covert projects since at least 2017 and, in strategic documents, regarded bioengineered coronaviruses as the “new era of genetic weapons.”
By the second half of 2019, the Chinese plan shifted gears, and not only involved working on a highly transmissible and deadly variant of RaTG13 but also beginning to come up with a vaccine for it, with the apparent intention to inoculate their own population before spreading it to potential adversaries. The vaccine development was given to the PLA’s own specialist, Zhou Yusen, who began working on the cure sometime before November 2019. In May 2020, Zhou died by allegedly falling from the roof of the Wuhan Institute.
The leak and the cover-up
In the second week of November 2019, three of Dr. Shi’s researchers working in the Wuhan lab fell sick with coronavirus symptoms, and one of their family members died, according to communication intercepted by the State Department. “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely COVID-19,” a U.S. investigator told The Sunday Times. “Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
Further evidence pointing to this event as the exact moment of the leak also surfaced, such as the fact that the Wuhan lab asked for a tourniquet on November 15th to treat researchers “exposed accidentally” to pathogens, and that a few days later it issued a procurement request for an incinerator to sanitize air that was being pumped out of the complex.
On November 19th, the head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences also paid a visit to Wuhan, bearing direct instructions from President Xi Jinping regarding “a complex and grave situation.” From then on, it was a strict informational lockdown, and when the outbreak started to become obvious in December, the authorities were quick to point at the wet market a few miles to the northwest as ground zero.
In the early months of the pandemic, many Chinese and international virologists were tasked with finding the origin of COVID-19 and had been dispatched in teams to test bat populations in nearly every cave in Yunnan. Nearly all, but one: the Mojiang copper mine. When one team of scientists, led by Dr. Alice Hughes, went there to test in June 2020, the Chinese police arrived almost immediately, confiscated the samples, and detained the team for 48 hours.
Hughes herself was told by the authorities that from then on she was being monitored. and to keep her mouth shut about Mojiang. After a ban was enforced on searching for bat viruses in the entire Yunnan region in early 2021, Hughes moved to Hong Kong where she was able to tell the story without fear of repercussions.
Dr. Shi still works at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and it’s unknown whether she ever returned to the Mojiang mine after the COVID-19 outbreak. As for other Chinese virologists, the question of COVID’s origin remains a scientific taboo, and everyone pretends they still believe the wet market narrative, lest they want to attract trouble.
So, there it is. It took less than two decades for a research project to turn harmless coronaviruses into deadly pathogens capable of unleashing a global pandemic. And while these investigations put the blame mostly on Beijing and its secret bioweapon research, its advancement was made possible by careless U.S. officials, shady scientists, and millions of American taxpayer dollars.
One only wonders if we will ever get such detailed reports of what happened behind closed doors after the pandemic began. Exposing the origin of the virus is one thing; unveiling the mechanisms behind our collectively catastrophic pandemic response is another. Nonetheless, the story of what went down in Wuhan is still a remarkable tale of unrestrained human vice, evident now that nearly all the pieces are in place. For those interested, The Sunday Times’ much more detailed, full report can be read here.
