Excellent piece, thank you. Naturally, an hypothesis is just that, unless it’s tested and cannot be reproducibly falsified. So the “lab leak hypothesis” is one theory amongst several.
What’s concerned me for some time is not just that so many people seek to shut down investigation and even debate on this subject – it’s more that so many of those people have been involved with key players in the funding of gain of function work. Not, I am sure, that this would provoke any reticence to engage in open scientific inquiry. Clearly I’m a paranoid conspiracy nut (rather than a professional biologist of some 30 years’ standing)… though I’m beginning to learn that my fully-functioning bulls**t detector is at least as helpful as qualifications and experience in the current SNAFU.
At the time of the time of the first lockdown this highly contagious virus had been abroad for at least 4 or 5 months and possibly longer. There was going to be no putting the genie back in the bottle and it was not particularly virulent.
Accordingly, I have wondered whether the response of the authority was, in some considerable part, based on at least a suspicion that the Chinese had inserted a furin cleavage site into SARS viruses and everyone was in a panic about how it might develop
Extending on that, my thought is that, initially, China ignored and then suppressed information about the new disease. But, at some point, someone joined up “outbreak of new coronavirus disease around Wuhan” and “WIV has worked on bat coronavirus/HIV chimeras” (see earlier papers from WIV). And though, h**y s**t, have we released an airborne HIV? At which point they panicked. By the time it was apparent that SARS-Cov-2 was not that lethal, it was too late to backtrack, and the most of the world had followed suit. The reset, as they say, is history.
“Not that lethal”??? The global mortality attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic was recently estimated to total over 18-million through Dec. 31, 2021. Likely by now it exceeds 20-million. See: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)02796-3/fulltext
That seems fairly “lethal” according to the standard meaning of this word.
Last edited 1 year ago by Darrell Boone
Brian Villanueva
2 years ago
Amazing reporting. The NY Times or Guardian or Washington Post can’t manage to do put this tory together, but a small online outlet like Unherd scoops all of them. That’s why they’re hemorrhaging subscribers and you’re growing.
Michael Coleman
2 years ago
This article leaves the impression that the Chinese cut out western scientists well before the pandemic start – but fails to mention the whole western coverup Lancet letter headed by Daszak that tried to gaslight the west that the source could not possibly be the WIV. Not proof, but enough smoke for me to believe it is more likely than not there was a lab leak and western scientists are complicit in it.
R Wright
2 years ago
“On 12 September 2019, this database was suddenly taken offline. The Institute has not published any details of the SARS-like viruses they were studying after 2016, claiming that people were trying to hack the database.”
It is all so tiresome.
ARNAUD ALMARIC
2 years ago
Thank you for that brilliant description of what hopefully may turn out to be the greatest scandal of the century. Chinese ‘fingerprints’ appear to be everywhere, which is hardly surprising given their devious nature.
However that famous question, asked centuries ago by the Noble Roman, Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla, “Cui Bono”? has yet to be satisfactorily answered.
As the most reliable scientific commentator in the ‘known world’ I am certain that Matt Ridley will soon provide that answer.
I think it has been quite comprehensively answered in robert f Kennedy’s recent book, The Real Anthony Fauci. Huge amounts of money controlled and disbursed by Fauci et al to promote virus and vaccine research by big pharma and others, over the last 30 years.
Thank you, I have yet to read that. Perhaps a naive question, but why has Fauci not been “clapped in irons”, prior to being executed in the traditional manner?
Fauci is a leading member of “The Swamp” and knows where many “Dead Bodies” are buried and by whom. There has been a lot of information aboiut Fauci found in dribs and drabs including an apparent direct disobedience of a Presidential Order regarding payments to “The Bat Lady/The Wuhan Lab.”. It would seem that he is being protected by the American Press (and Others?)
If there is anyone’s fingerprints all over this it is Fauci and America. That is not to say China is not involved as they likely are, as are the Ukrainians. You don’t have over two dozen fully operational biolabs operating in a country without the country’s government knowing something about it.
And why aren’t big questions being asked urgently as to the exact involvement of the President of America’s son with these biolabs. That beggars belief when the world has been thrown into chaos and multigenerational debt due to what is highly likely to be a biolab leak.
The only people who still think these things are conspiracy theories are people who haven’t been paying attention. Thankfully more and more people are not blindly following whatever the media tells them to believe, and are starting to ask basic questions.
“Cui Bono”? After the most massive upward transfer of wealth in history facilitated by legislative fiat, that answer seems obvious. Whether this was a result of planning or typical opportunism by well-positioned corporate scavengers, remains to be learned. Perhaps a bit of both which does not bode well for humanity.
N T
2 years ago
Until the natural selection hypothesis gets some actual, real-life evidence, the “duh” hypothesis is going to rule, despite the experts claiming otherwise.
Let me know when there is a real in-the-wild Covid-19 analog found in some non-human. Until then, the correct answer is “duh”.
David Kingsworthy
2 years ago
To my untrained ears this suggests that the recent/current? epidemic resulted from either accidental or deliberate manipulation and release of a deadly virus. I can imagine the Chinese wanting to hide/obscure the truth of both scenarios.
Mike Michaels
2 years ago
“There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, Pennsylvania”
Luke I
2 years ago
Your investigation and analysis has been so grounded. If all your findings could be collated into a feature film, I reckon it could make real waves
Kieran Saxon
1 year ago
We need to look seriously at reparations.
Kieran Saxon
1 year ago
We need to look seriously at reparations.
Darrell Boone
1 year ago
This excellent article repeatedly makes mention of George Gao. The following 3 examples provides additional historical context about Gao: First, after explaining that China’s government was caught and publicly/internationally embarrassed for trying to cover-up their first outbreak of a SARS virus during 2002 & 2003, PBS’s “FRONTLINE” investigative report described an important development in the aftermath of this debacle which heralded a significant reform that would detect all future SARS-like outbreaks so they can be “nipped in the bud”: NARRATOR [for “CHINA’S COVID SECRETS” – FRONTLINE: Season 39, Episode 12 – Aired Feb. 2, 2021]
Beijing set about making sure that SARS could not happen again. The following year it began creating what it has claimed is the largest online infectious diseases reporting system in the world, run from the Center for Disease Control, China’s CDC. IAN LIPKIN, Center for Infection and Immunity, Columbia Univ.:
I helped them develop the national CDC. The CDC that I first visited was in disrepair. That’s completely changed.
And what they did was they created these various programs—there was a hundred talents, a thousand talents—so that people who had been trained in other parts of the world were recruited back to China to contribute to the establishment of new infrastructure for infectious disease surveillance. NARRATOR:
One of those recruits was George Gao, a virologist at Oxford University. He became the head of the China CDC in 2017. GEORGE GAO:
Let me tell you how we organize the disease control and public health in China: surveillance. We have the general centralized data center within China CDC. I will know within hours whether or not we have a outbreak, even in a small village. NARRATOR: By 2019, Gao was promising that the country’s new online surveillance system would be able to prevent another outbreak like SARS. YANZHONG HUANG, Sr. Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations:
So they were indeed confident that they had the capacity to handle well a major disease outbreak should it happen, that they would be able to nip the crisis in the bud. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets/transcript/ In addition, “Spike” is a 2021 book by Jeremy Farrar – a British medical researcher and Director of the Wellcome Trust, a global foundation “which supports science to solve urgent health challenges”. Farrar was also intimately involved in the infamous telephone conference on Feb. 1, 2020 with Fauci, Collins and several virologist in which they debated an initial consensus that the virus responsible for the impending Covid-19 pandemic more than likely did NOT have a “natural origin” (i.e., it likely was a laboratory creation).
Farrar’s book selectively details his role in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. He begins “Spike” by describing a telephone call on December 30, 2019 from George Gao – the “head of the Chinese Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) in Beijing” – an “old friend” of Farrar. The purpose of Gao’s call was to assure Farrar about the “cluster of cases of a new pneumonia from Wuhan in China”. Farrar wrote: “I remember him telling me that we wouldn’t need to worry because it wasn’t Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)…”
According to Farrar, Gao was under pressure and likely lied to him, as later in the opening chapter of “Spike” Farrar wrote that there were several verified sources indicating the China CDC received notice from a Chinese genomics laboratory on Dec. 27, 2019 (3 days before Gao’s call) which confirmed this “new pneumonia” was indeed caused by a SARS virus. Furthermore, for his Dec. 28, 2020 article – “The Plague Year” – for the “New Yorker”, Lawrence Wright interviewed Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield recounted several phone calls he had with his Chinese counterpart – George Gao – about the new pneumonia cases, including one on Jan. 3, 2020 in which Gao told him that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission [another lie]. Redfield described a disturbing call a few days later in which Gao started to cry and said: “I think we’re too late” [to keep the virus outbreak from spreading].
“Too late…”; INDEED!
Excellent piece, thank you. Naturally, an hypothesis is just that, unless it’s tested and cannot be reproducibly falsified. So the “lab leak hypothesis” is one theory amongst several.
What’s concerned me for some time is not just that so many people seek to shut down investigation and even debate on this subject – it’s more that so many of those people have been involved with key players in the funding of gain of function work. Not, I am sure, that this would provoke any reticence to engage in open scientific inquiry. Clearly I’m a paranoid conspiracy nut (rather than a professional biologist of some 30 years’ standing)… though I’m beginning to learn that my fully-functioning bulls**t detector is at least as helpful as qualifications and experience in the current SNAFU.
At the time of the time of the first lockdown this highly contagious virus had been abroad for at least 4 or 5 months and possibly longer. There was going to be no putting the genie back in the bottle and it was not particularly virulent.
Accordingly, I have wondered whether the response of the authority was, in some considerable part, based on at least a suspicion that the Chinese had inserted a furin cleavage site into SARS viruses and everyone was in a panic about how it might develop
Extending on that, my thought is that, initially, China ignored and then suppressed information about the new disease. But, at some point, someone joined up “outbreak of new coronavirus disease around Wuhan” and “WIV has worked on bat coronavirus/HIV chimeras” (see earlier papers from WIV). And though, h**y s**t, have we released an airborne HIV? At which point they panicked. By the time it was apparent that SARS-Cov-2 was not that lethal, it was too late to backtrack, and the most of the world had followed suit. The reset, as they say, is history.
“Not that lethal”??? The global mortality attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic was recently estimated to total over 18-million through Dec. 31, 2021. Likely by now it exceeds 20-million. See: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)02796-3/fulltext
That seems fairly “lethal” according to the standard meaning of this word.
Amazing reporting. The NY Times or Guardian or Washington Post can’t manage to do put this tory together, but a small online outlet like Unherd scoops all of them. That’s why they’re hemorrhaging subscribers and you’re growing.
This article leaves the impression that the Chinese cut out western scientists well before the pandemic start – but fails to mention the whole western coverup Lancet letter headed by Daszak that tried to gaslight the west that the source could not possibly be the WIV. Not proof, but enough smoke for me to believe it is more likely than not there was a lab leak and western scientists are complicit in it.
“On 12 September 2019, this database was suddenly taken offline. The Institute has not published any details of the SARS-like viruses they were studying after 2016, claiming that people were trying to hack the database.”
It is all so tiresome.
Thank you for that brilliant description of what hopefully may turn out to be the greatest scandal of the century. Chinese ‘fingerprints’ appear to be everywhere, which is hardly surprising given their devious nature.
However that famous question, asked centuries ago by the Noble Roman, Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla, “Cui Bono”? has yet to be satisfactorily answered.
As the most reliable scientific commentator in the ‘known world’ I am certain that Matt Ridley will soon provide that answer.
I think it has been quite comprehensively answered in robert f Kennedy’s recent book, The Real Anthony Fauci. Huge amounts of money controlled and disbursed by Fauci et al to promote virus and vaccine research by big pharma and others, over the last 30 years.
Thank you, I have yet to read that. Perhaps a naive question, but why has Fauci not been “clapped in irons”, prior to being executed in the traditional manner?
Fauci is a leading member of “The Swamp” and knows where many “Dead Bodies” are buried and by whom. There has been a lot of information aboiut Fauci found in dribs and drabs including an apparent direct disobedience of a Presidential Order regarding payments to “The Bat Lady/The Wuhan Lab.”. It would seem that he is being protected by the American Press (and Others?)
A good question. I think it shows how powerful and well connected these people are.
If there is anyone’s fingerprints all over this it is Fauci and America. That is not to say China is not involved as they likely are, as are the Ukrainians. You don’t have over two dozen fully operational biolabs operating in a country without the country’s government knowing something about it.
And why aren’t big questions being asked urgently as to the exact involvement of the President of America’s son with these biolabs. That beggars belief when the world has been thrown into chaos and multigenerational debt due to what is highly likely to be a biolab leak.
The only people who still think these things are conspiracy theories are people who haven’t been paying attention. Thankfully more and more people are not blindly following whatever the media tells them to believe, and are starting to ask basic questions.
“Cui Bono”? After the most massive upward transfer of wealth in history facilitated by legislative fiat, that answer seems obvious. Whether this was a result of planning or typical opportunism by well-positioned corporate scavengers, remains to be learned. Perhaps a bit of both which does not bode well for humanity.
Until the natural selection hypothesis gets some actual, real-life evidence, the “duh” hypothesis is going to rule, despite the experts claiming otherwise.
Let me know when there is a real in-the-wild Covid-19 analog found in some non-human. Until then, the correct answer is “duh”.
To my untrained ears this suggests that the recent/current? epidemic resulted from either accidental or deliberate manipulation and release of a deadly virus. I can imagine the Chinese wanting to hide/obscure the truth of both scenarios.
“There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, Pennsylvania”
Your investigation and analysis has been so grounded. If all your findings could be collated into a feature film, I reckon it could make real waves
We need to look seriously at reparations.
We need to look seriously at reparations.
This excellent article repeatedly makes mention of George Gao. The following 3 examples provides additional historical context about Gao:
First, after explaining that China’s government was caught and publicly/internationally embarrassed for trying to cover-up their first outbreak of a SARS virus during 2002 & 2003, PBS’s “FRONTLINE” investigative report described an important development in the aftermath of this debacle which heralded a significant reform that would detect all future SARS-like outbreaks so they can be “nipped in the bud”:
NARRATOR [for “CHINA’S COVID SECRETS” – FRONTLINE: Season 39, Episode 12 – Aired Feb. 2, 2021]
Beijing set about making sure that SARS could not happen again. The following year it began creating what it has claimed is the largest online infectious diseases reporting system in the world, run from the Center for Disease Control, China’s CDC.
IAN LIPKIN, Center for Infection and Immunity, Columbia Univ.:
I helped them develop the national CDC. The CDC that I first visited was in disrepair. That’s completely changed.
And what they did was they created these various programs—there was a hundred talents, a thousand talents—so that people who had been trained in other parts of the world were recruited back to China to contribute to the establishment of new infrastructure for infectious disease surveillance.
NARRATOR:
One of those recruits was George Gao, a virologist at Oxford University. He became the head of the China CDC in 2017.
GEORGE GAO:
Let me tell you how we organize the disease control and public health in China: surveillance. We have the general centralized data center within China CDC. I will know within hours whether or not we have a outbreak, even in a small village.
NARRATOR:
By 2019, Gao was promising that the country’s new online surveillance system would be able to prevent another outbreak like SARS.
YANZHONG HUANG, Sr. Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations:
So they were indeed confident that they had the capacity to handle well a major disease outbreak should it happen, that they would be able to nip the crisis in the bud.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets/transcript/
In addition, “Spike” is a 2021 book by Jeremy Farrar – a British medical researcher and Director of the Wellcome Trust, a global foundation “which supports science to solve urgent health challenges”. Farrar was also intimately involved in the infamous telephone conference on Feb. 1, 2020 with Fauci, Collins and several virologist in which they debated an initial consensus that the virus responsible for the impending Covid-19 pandemic more than likely did NOT have a “natural origin” (i.e., it likely was a laboratory creation).
Farrar’s book selectively details his role in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. He begins “Spike” by describing a telephone call on December 30, 2019 from George Gao – the “head of the Chinese Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) in Beijing” – an “old friend” of Farrar. The purpose of Gao’s call was to assure Farrar about the “cluster of cases of a new pneumonia from Wuhan in China”. Farrar wrote: “I remember him telling me that we wouldn’t need to worry because it wasn’t Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)…”
According to Farrar, Gao was under pressure and likely lied to him, as later in the opening chapter of “Spike” Farrar wrote that there were several verified sources indicating the China CDC received notice from a Chinese genomics laboratory on Dec. 27, 2019 (3 days before Gao’s call) which confirmed this “new pneumonia” was indeed caused by a SARS virus.
Furthermore, for his Dec. 28, 2020 article – “The Plague Year” – for the “New Yorker”, Lawrence Wright interviewed Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield recounted several phone calls he had with his Chinese counterpart – George Gao – about the new pneumonia cases, including one on Jan. 3, 2020 in which Gao told him that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission [another lie]. Redfield described a disturbing call a few days later in which Gao started to cry and said: “I think we’re too late” [to keep the virus outbreak from spreading].
“Too late…”; INDEED!