Latest News From Wuhan: The Lab Leak Theory Confirmed?

Evidence suggests that COVID-19 was likely created in a laboratory.

In April 2012, six workers in an abandoned mine in Yunnan Province, China, contracted a mysterious illness while removing bat droppings. Three of them died. A little later, Shi Zhengli, a leading scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and her team headed to this same Yunnan mine to inquire into the case.

For three years, Zhengli combed through the mine and ended up discovering no less than 293 coronaviruses, probably carried by the bats that live in these places. One of those coronaviruses came from a lineage of SARS-like viruses (SARS: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) never seen before. Zhengli called it RaBtCoV/4991.

For some, it was this RaBtCoV/4991, or one of its parents, that locked us all down for two and a half years in the worst pandemic since the 1918–1919 Spanish Flu.

Killer Viruses

When the death of the miners occurred, the Chinese authorities covered up the whole story, failing among other things to warn the World Health Organization (WHO) about it, despite the fact that the three men had been exposed to a deadly virus.

Around the same time, a company was paying close attention to Shi Zhengli’s work. This company, which was unknown at the time but which has become infamous since then, is EcoHealth Alliance, whose CEO is Peter Daszak. The moment was appropriate for EcoHealth Alliance as it had just received a $3.7 million grant from the U.S. government. Daszak, who was thrilled at the prospect of collaborating with the WIV, donated $630,000 to Zhengli’s team for coronavirus research.

Daszak was not the first scientist outside China with whom Zhengli’s team had worked. Ralph Baric, from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had created a lethal virus with the help of his colleagues from the WIV. You’ve read that right: Baric and the WIV had created a lethal virus.

The Obama administration was wary of these laboratory experiments and decided to introduce a moratorium on what is called “gain of function” research, which consists in genetically modifying viruses to make them more transmissible or more virulent in order to study their effects. Still, the scientists managed to sneak through the branches thanks to a loophole in Obama’s executive order that allowed them to continue their work if deemed urgent and safe.

That kind of work, though, could at any time drag the world into a pandemic. For many, this is precisely what happened in 2019–2020.

A Disreputable Lab

Around 2016, the Wuhan Institute of Virology intensified its research using Ralph Baric’s techniques. The WIV ended up creating two mutants by merging viruses with one of those — possibly RaBtCoV/4991 — that were found in the abandoned mine in Yunnan. The same year, Peter Daszak announced at a conference in New York that Shi Zhengli was about to develop a potentially pathogenic virus for humans. No one, it seems, waved the red flag at that moment.

A year or so later, Shi Shengli, in an article, admitted to having created two mutant viruses that affected human cells. This time, the event triggered the alarm. In Shanghai, the U.S. Embassy was on high alert. Diplomats with scientific expertise were dispatched to inspect the WIV in January 2018. The diplomats in question observed “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

But that didn’t move the scientists at the WIV who carried on with their experiments. One of their mutant viruses, for that matter, killed 75% of the mice used during the said experiments. Not a single line on the subject would appear in any scientific work. China wanted no one outside of Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak to know that its “Drs. Jekylls” were playing with fire.

The Military in the Front Row

Based on these results, Peter Daszak submitted a $14.2 million grant application to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in 2018. Daszak wished to replicate the WIV’s feat. What, concretely, is DARPA? It is an agency linked to the United States Department of Defense responsible for the research and development of new technologies for military use.

Shi Zhengli was obviously approached to work with Daszak on this project. But DARPA declined to fund the research. “It is clear that the proposed […] project led by Peter Daszak could have put local communities at risk”, the agency responded. This was a close call for the United States.

But what one leaves, the other eats. And that other one, you guessed it, is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been working since at least 2016 with the Chinese military in coronavirus research. It was also around 2016–2017 that the WIV’s scientists started to distance themselves from their French mentors who were helping them in the biosafety training.

The fact that the Chinese military has joined the WIV makes us believe that it is perhaps no coincidence that Major General Chen Wei, China’s top military expert in biological warfare, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January 2020 to take the leading role in the fight against the coronavirus.

“Patients Zero” Among the WIV Employees

In November 2021, obedient media announced that Science magazine had discovered the identity of “patient zero”, the first person infected by COVID-19. That person, whose name was not disclosed, was an employee of Wuhan’s wet market. Science argued in all seriousness that the woman had contracted the virus on December 11, 2019, even though it was already acknowledged that residents of Wuhan had complained as soon as November — if not before — of symptoms similar to pneumonia.

And thanks to American intelligence, it was also known that employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology had become ill in the fall of 2019. The names of those employees have recently been made public. They are Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu, who worked alongside Shi Zhengli on bat coronaviruses at the WIV. None of them died.

Ben Hu has co-authored several articles on coronavirus research, including one in 2017 with a well-known collaborator: Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance. It is the same Peter Daszak who, at the start of the pandemic, did everything to quash the theory that the virus came from a laboratory. The scientist deliberately concealed the facts about his collaboration with the WIV.

As an epilogue, we’ll give the floor to FBI Director Christopher Wray who, last February, said aloud what the State Department had already confessed about the origins of COVID-19: “[T]he FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

Sources

Public, The Daily Caller, The Times, The Washington Times, TV5 Monde