Despite all that we don’t, and may never, know about the origins of Covid, a number of tantalising clues and hard-won intelligence point to at least one alarming conclusion.
That’s that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was collaborating with both foreign and Chinese agencies on incredibly dangerous research with deadly coronaviruses. In particular, and in strict secrecy even from its other collaborators, the WIV was working with the Chinese military on clandestine bio-weapons program.
In particular, the military wanted to develop a deadly virus and a vaccine against it, so that it could inoculate its own population while infecting its enemies.
It seems certain that the WIV indeed created such a virus – Covid-19 – by engineering dangerously mutated versions of SARS-like coronaviruses and then repeatedly infecting humanised mice. Such experiments would explain a remarkable fact about Covid: for the first time known to science, a bat virus apparently directly infected humans and killed them. Covid-19 was suspiciously well-adapted to infect humans.
Even more suspiciously, Chinese military scientist Zhou Yusen produced a patent for a Covid vaccine a little over a month after China first revealed the outbreak in Wuhan. Such a truly warp-speed vaccine development could only have occurred if Zhou was developing it from right when the first patients zero are believed to have been infected, in November 2019 – or even earlier.
But Zhou seems to have died in May 2020, aged 54, allegedly from falling from the roof of the WIV.
As reported in the first part of this series, the suspected patients zero in the Covid pandemic were all WIV researchers allegedly involved in the dangerous gain of function research at the woefully insecure laboratory.
An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory of Dr Shi. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
But Zhou’s apparent vaccine development, and a trio of scientists dropping dead on the job, were just some of the buzzing activity in Wuhan in that fateful November, 2019.
[The institute] issued a patent on November 15 for a tourniquet to treat researchers who are “exposed accidentally, especially when wounds such as needle pricks and blade cuts occur”. A few days later, it sent out a procurement request for an incinerator to sanitise air being piped out of its laboratory complex.
On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important “oral and written” instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding “a complex and grave situation”.
The Times
So, did China release the virus deliberately, or was it, as it is officially no longer a ‘conspiracy theory’, a case of an accidental lab leak?
Given the lax biosecurity, the cavalier attitude to incredibly dangerous research and the panicked swirl of activity around the WIV in late 2019, the leak seems most likely. Not that we’ll probably ever know for sure.
The CCP has a long history of suppressing virus outbreaks, leading to otherwise-avoidable pandemics. It kept secret the 1957 outbreak in Guizhou province that eventually led to what was known as the Asian flu pandemic. It did the same in 1968, spreading a virulent new influenza via Hong Kong. The Hong Kong flu was probably just as deadly as Covid-19. China played ‘hide the virus’ again in 2002, keeping the SARS outbreak secret until Canadian intelligence leaked its existence.
Covid was no different.
True to form, Beijing swung straight into cover-up mode in 2019. When Wuhan University published a study locating the hot spots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid, the WIV was not marked on the map. When a US Senate report published the map with the WIV marked, it was right next to the biggest hotspot.
At the same time, the mine in Yunnan where the original virus samples were taken from was strictly locked down. Any known samples were confiscated by Chinese police, and researchers interrogated and surveilled.
Just to add a final and appropriate twist to the whole saga, when the WHO sent an investigative team to Wuhan, guess who was on the team? None other than Peter Daszak. The same Peter Daszak who was not only in the thick of the research that certainly created Covid, but who vehemently decried the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory”.
But, really, does it matter if we ever know it was a lab leak or not? How would things have turned out any differently if China had released the virus as planned? Perhaps China may have secretly vaccinated its people before deliberately releasing the virus, but given what we now know about Covid vaccines efficacy, it would likely have wasted its effort.
And its planned strategy of crippling foreign enemies with fear would have worked just the same.