(“The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown Viruses.” – Masters thesis, 2013) – It’s almost as if, among the Technocratic Non-Elite, it has long been common knowledge and beyond any real doubt that covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab. One could almost be forgiven for suspecting that that that this was yet another Noble Lie that our Priests of Permissible Knowledge created for us.

KEY LINKS and quick summary:

Vanity Fair

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

Ace of Spades:

  • Peter Daszak funneled money through his company EcoHealth Alliance from the US government to the Wuhan Institute of Virology
  • Peter Daszak was also working on gain-of-function research… supposedly in the US.
  • Peter Daszak was also working with Shi Zenglii, “The Bat Lady,” on bat virues.
  • He claims, or at least Fauci claims on his behalf, that while he was working on gain-of-function and funding Wuhan, and working with the Bat Lady, he certainly did not fund or work with the Bat Lady on gain-of-function!
  • Peter Daszak wrote the Lancet Statement, a filthily political document that “settled” the question of a lab leak not by presenting science, but by denouncing anyone who asked questions about a lab link as a racist trying to help conspiracy theorists harass and harm Chinese scientists. And he “bullied” other scientists into signing it or accepting it as true. But he hid the fact that he wrote the statement, and hid the fact that he was the primary organizing force collecting the signatures.

2020-2021

Before getting to the most recent and juiciest stuff published in 2023 it pays to remember that fights over this issue began almost as soon as the pandemic started spreading around the world in January 2020.

In January 2020 Senator Tom Cotton called for a targeted China travel ban to prevent spread of the Covid virus (letter posted here). Senator Cotton was warning that China was covering up the lethality of the disease and doing little to stop what became a global pandemic.
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In February 2020 Senator Cotton ventured the hypothesis that the virus “might have something to do with the laboratories conducting dangerous research on similar viruses in the city,” as Isaac Schorr puts it in his Mediaite retrospective on the abuse administered to Senator Cotton by the deep thinkers of our garbage media establishment. Schorr observes that Senator Cotton’s comments “were treated as not just factually mistaken, but morally repugnant.”

That last is the key to this entire pandemic. For all the garbage spewed forth by “scientists”, politicians, and the MSM, it all rapidly devolved into a morality war and the fight to define that and then apply it to the goodies and the baddies – and that fight got weird at times:

“On Face the Nation, CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan turned to an envoy of the Chinese Communist Party in an apparent effort to debunk Cotton, asking the Chinese ambassador to the United States to respond to Cotton and then posting the clip with the caption NEW: @AmbCuiTiankai dismisses conspiracy theories pushed by @SenTomCotton that it’s being used as biological warfare as ‘absolutely crazy.’”

And the Chinese had help in screaming about conspiracy theories:

When the pandemic happened to break out on the doorstep of the lab with the largest collection of coronaviruses in the world, fueling speculation that the WIV might be involved, Daszak and 26 other scientists signed a letter that appeared in The Lancet on February 19, 2020. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” it stated.

That last was the primary shield behind which almost every expert, journalist and politician hid. This wall of denial lasted through 2020 as other fights raged about lockdowns, “social distancing”, masks and possible therapeutic treatments, eventually to the vaccines released towards the end of the year.

But by early 2021 cracks in the wall began to show, notably starting with the new Biden administration:

“As of today, the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question,” Biden explained.

That sounds rather mild but it’s a million miles away from the definitive dismissal of the lab leak theory that had dominated. Even the Washington Post finally, grudgingly acknowledged the problem, but only after Biden spoke and even then the MSM “experts” were making excuses for themselves:

For about a year, [the idea that the lab leak theory was “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory”] was the general wisdom among science writers

Here’s a hint: “science writers” are almost never scientists and won’t be no matter how often they talk to scientists.

The “lab-leak theory” migrated back to the far right where it had started — championed by the folks who brought us Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion. It was tarred by the fact that everyone backing it seemed to hate not just Democrats and the Chinese Communist Party, but even the Chinese themselves. It spawned racist rumors like “Chinese labs sell their dead experimental animals in food markets.”

Hmmmm…. Maybe it’s just me but none of that sounds like scientific or even common reasoning. It sounds like rationalised bullshit, but I am glad he admitted all this so that I never have to take notice of former NYT reporter Don MacNeil ever again on science (or anything since those are his drivers). He wasn’t alone of course, as this link shows by capturing the scum of CNN, MSNBC, NPR and the rest of the MSM acting exactly the same way for the same reasons.

I had to laugh at the once respectable, Sold-For-$US1.00 magazine Newsweek for getting into action in June 2021 with a pretty good article (really, you should read it all) summarising the groups working on the question and what they’d uncovered. Of course they had to do a bit of back-patting first:

 (Newsweek was an exception, reporting in April 2020 that the WIV was involved in gain-of-function research and might have been the site of a lab leak; Mother Jones, Business Insider, the NY Post and FOX News were also exceptions.)

Uh huh. Still won’t be subscribing to you. However, they’re generous enough to describe the various sleuths as amateurs doing what professionals should have been doing from the start and they do land this early blow on the source of the denial bullshit and the motives behind it:

Chief among these scientists was a biologist named Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group that ran a large international program to survey natural pathogens with the potential to cause a pandemic. Daszak had been collaborating for years with Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a renowned bat virologist. Daszak co-authored nearly a dozen papers with Shi and funneled at least $600,000 of U.S. government grants her way.
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By 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was pulling in up to $15 million a year in grant money from an array of federal agencies, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to 990 tax exemption forms it filed with the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau.

The same guy who orchestrated the Lancet “conspiracy theory” letter, and although nobody knew that at the time the connections of EcoHealth Alliance and WIV were known – yet no journalist ever pointed out that Daszak’s career and his organisation would be deeply damaged if it was a lab leak, nor would any of them ever point this obvious motivation to lie.

“If zoonosis was the origin, it was a validation…of his life work…. But if the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”

There are some great snippets from the article as the researchers looked for the links:

He was on the verge of calling it quits, he says, when he struck gold: a 60-page master’s thesis written by a student at Kunming Medical University in 2013 titled “The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown Viruses.” In exhaustive detail, it described the conditions and step-by-step treatment of the miners. It named the suspected culprit: “Caused by SARS-like [coronavirus] from the Chinese horseshoe bat or other bats.”
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Within days, DRASTIC managed to locate the coordinates of the mysterious Mojiang mine, but it would not catch the attention of the media until late 2020
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By examining some metadata tags that had been accidentally uploaded by the WIV along with its genetic sequences for RaTG13, Ribera discovered that scientists at the lab had indeed been actively studying the virus in 2017 and 2018—they hadn’t stuck it in a freezer and forgotten about it, after all. [another Daszak lie]
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The WIV maintained a database on its website with all the data on the viruses in its collection, including the many unpublished ones, but that page on its website has been empty for some time… the [WIV] database was taken down on September 12, 2019, shortly before the start of the pandemic, and well before the WIV would have become a target.
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On nearly the same day, The Seeker struck again. Visiting a database hosted by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, he searched for all theses supervised by Shi Zhengli. Boom. Three hits. “I got it on my first try,” he says. “Not sure why no one else thought of this before, but I guess no one was looking.”

If there had been any remaining doubt about the WIV’s pattern of deception, these new theses put it to rest. They indicated that the WIV researchers had never believed a fungus had killed the Mojiang miners, contradicting Shi’s remarks in Scientific American and elsewhere. In fact, WIV researchers had been so concerned about a new SARS-like outbreak that they’d tested the blood of neighboring villagers for other cases. And they had known the genetic sequences for the eight other SARS-like viruses from the mine—which could have helped researchers to understand more about SARS-CoV-2 in the early days —long before the pandemic started, and had kept the information to themselves, until DRASTIC called them out.

Interestingly the DRASTIC team (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) of which Newsweek writes has a New Zealand connection (which they don’t mention), and that is better described in this even more detailed article in Vanity Fair (also June 2021). I would strongly urge you to read the whole thing:

Gilles Demaneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome ten years ago, and believes it gives him a professional advantage. “I’m very good at finding patterns in data, when other people see nothing,” he says.

But that article also takes a closer, harder look at the US government’s “efforts” to dig into this mystery, and it’s as ugly as the MSM’s, and for the same reason, Trump:

Then, the bomb-thrower-in-chief weighed in. At a press briefing just hours later, Trump contradicted his own intelligence officials and claimed that he had seen classified information indicating that the virus had come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Asked what the evidence was, he said, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

Trump’s premature statement poisoned the waters for anyone seeking an honest answer to the question of where COVID-19 came from. According to Pottinger, there was an “antibody response” within the government, in which any discussion of a possible lab origin was linked to destructive nativist posturing.

Oh FFS! Every US President has had foibles about issues and made public statements that may have disturbed TPTB within the Washington D.C. Federal bureaucracies. So what: your job is to continue to do your job without incorporating your own political rationales, which just so happen to magically align with the political rationales of Trump’s opponents, including the MSM. Being Vanity Fair they have to include this excuse:

And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

Even with all this baggage however, the facts applying to that question kept adding up, even for D.C. bureaucrats:

Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, all connected with gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, had fallen ill in November 2019 and appeared to have visited the hospital with symptoms similar to COVID-19, three government officials told Vanity Fair. While it is not clear what had sickened them, “these were not the janitors,” said the former State Department official. “They were active researchers. The dates were among the absolute most arresting part of the picture, because they are smack where they would be if this was the origin.” The reaction inside the State Department was, “Holy shit,” one former senior official recalled.

That still didn’t stop crap like this from happening:

In early July, the World Health Organization invited the U.S. government to recommend experts for a fact-finding mission to Wuhan, a sign of progress in the long-delayed probe of COVID-19’s origins. Questions about the WHO’s independence from China, the country’s secrecy, and the raging pandemic had turned the anticipated mission into a minefield of international grudges and suspicion.

Within weeks, the U.S. government submitted three names to the WHO: an FDA veterinarian, a CDC epidemiologist, and an NIAID virologist. None were chosen. Instead, only one representative from the U.S. made the cut: Peter Daszak.

AYFKM? As you can predict his response was, “nothing to see here”, after two weeks of “investigation”:

The remaining two-week inquiry was more propaganda than probe, complete with a visit to an exhibit extolling President Xi’s leadership. The team saw almost no raw data, only the Chinese government analysis of it.

They paid one visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they met with Shi Zhengli, as recounted in an annex to the mission report. One obvious demand would have been access to the WIV’s database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, which had been taken offline. At an event convened by a London organization on March 10, Daszak was asked whether the group had made such a request.

He said there was no need: Shi Zhengli had stated that the WIV took down the database due to hacking attempts during the pandemic.

“Absolutely reasonable,” Daszak said. “And we did not ask to see the data… As you know, a lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance… We do basically know what’s in those databases. There is no evidence of viruses closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 in those databases, simple as that.”

In fact, the database had been taken offline on September 12, 2019, three months before the official start of the pandemic, a detail uncovered by Gilles Demaneuf and two of his DRASTIC colleagues.


… the Chinese and international experts concluded their mission by voting with a show of hands on which origin scenario seemed most probable. Direct transmission from bat to human: possible to likely. Transmission through an intermediate animal: likely to very likely. Transmission through frozen food: possible. Transmission through a laboratory incident: extremely unlikely.

Part XI of that Vanity Fair article has a lot of detail on what Daszak’s partner, Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli, was doing inside the Wuhan lab. She was obviously feeling the pressure:

“The 2019 novel coronavirus is a punishment from nature for humanity’s uncivilized habits,” she wrote in a February 2 post on WeChat, a popular social media app in China. “I, Shi Zhengli, guarantee on my life that it has nothing to do with our lab. May I offer some advice to those people who believe and spread bad media rumors: shut your dirty mouths.”

Don’t be too disturbed; it’s not the first time in history that a scientist has let their emotions fly off the handle. More disturbing was what happened to Dr Robert Redfield, a virologist by training, who was Trump’s head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and spoke up after Biden became President:

In a CNN interview on March 26, Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director under Trump, made a candid admission: “I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.” Redfield added that he believed the release was an accident, not an intentional act. In his view, nothing that happened since his first calls with Dr. Gao changed a simple fact: The WIV needed to be ruled out as a source, and it hadn’t been.

After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
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 “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

It almost didn’t matter what level of expertise a person had if the questioned that “natural” origins of the virus:

Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.

Didn’t matter. The internet was filled with denials of that (I vividly recall running into counter-claims from the likes of Kiwiblog moderators) and with MSM outfits like the NYT leading the pack:

At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the CCP story on the pandemic’s origins. And it celebrated China’s success in battling Covid-19, taking the CCP’s absurd mortality numbers at face value,

While their minnow competitors like RedState literally got throttled by the likes of Google, as RedState explained in 2021:

While it is certainly vindicating to see that the story may finally be told, it is frustrating that only certain approved members of the media class are allowed to be the ones to tell it. Our reporting on this information has been clear and factual from day one.  We have sourced our information to a fault, and now the media is chasing our reporting, acting like this is brand-new, breaking information.
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We’ve faced consequences from BigTech when their compromised “fact-checkers” (a/k/a propagandists) felt we were getting a little too close to the truth. When that happens, our traffic is throttled, revenue is reduced, and our reputation suffers since they’ve branded us as “unreliable.”

The real joke here is that it literally took an American Lefty comedian to dent the narrative solidly when he turned up on the show of a protege (and apologist of all things Democrat Party), Late Night with Steven Colbert, as NPR explained in a June 2021 piece, Why Jon Stewart’s Lab-Leak Moment Matters:

The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think? . . . What about this . . . there’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? “Oh, I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.” Or it’s the f***ing chocolate factory!
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The audience applauded, recall, when Jon Stewart pivoted to his lab-leak argument, and then continued to hoot and cheer as he steamrolled his sparring partner.

2023

But even so the news didn’t really start breaking until January 2023:

The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the COVID-19  pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified report recently provided to the White House and several members of Congress.

Even the Lefty founder (and data analyst) of the famous FiveThirtyEight political website, Nate Silver, was appalled by the story, which also detailed the cover ups noted two years earlier by Vanity Fair and others:

“Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I’ll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health.”

No kidding. In the wake of this other key members US public institutions began to fess up, with former WhiteHouse Covid Coordinator Deborah Birx in February:

And it makes total sense that China was working on a vaccine and growing these — growing these viruses in tissue culture. That changes the virus over time. That’s what you do in the laboratory. And so, it makes sense. And I think really getting people to get — I know we are never going to get the data from China. China has not been transparent. 

The FBI on March 1st

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday that the Covid pandemic was probably the result of a laboratory leak in China, providing the first public confirmation of the bureau’s classified judgment of how the virus that led to the deaths of nearly seven million people worldwide first emerged.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Mr. Wray told Fox News. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”

The Director of National Intelligence on April 18:

During the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe testified that “a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science, and by common sense.”

Even the Chinese got in on the confessions in June (at least off the record):

Instead, according to new reports this week three separate Chinese government officials have all named scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the first human to be infected with the new disease.
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Ben Hu was the protegee and successor to Shi Zhengli — the notorious “Bat Lady” of Wuhan.
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When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”
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Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing who raised questions starting in early 2020 about a possible research-related pandemic origin, said, “It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else. That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.”

Aye, there’s the rub. Absolute proof is never going to be found, which led to write ups like this one from Democrat Party and State Institutional stooge, Matthew Yglesias, explained:

Lab leak is not a debunked conspiracy theory and never has been.
The truth is we’ll just never know.

Well no, thanks as much to Western public institutions that didn’t want to know, plus the general MSM and even specialist Science magazines that the MSM relied upon, as the well respected magazine Tablet explained in Treason of the Science Journals:

As a product of its own hype, the science media has been granted a kind of epistemological special status on science-related issues. On matters related to science, the thinking among consumer journalists goes, surely the science writers will have more, and better, things to say. That might be true, but on issues where science, money, power and crisis collide, it almost certainly is not. And no issue brought together those four horsemen of enlightened corruption more dramatically than the COVID-19 pandemic.

And the CIA:

“A multi-decade, senior-level, current Agency officer has come forward to provide information to the Committees regarding the Agency’s analysis into the origins of COVID-19,” they wrote. The whistleblower told Congress that the CIA assigned seven officers to a COVID Discovery Team, which consisted of “multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”

“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed that intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” Wenstrup and Turner wrote.

“The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the one officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis.…The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” they said.

As Ace of Spades summed up:

It’s almost as if, among the Technocratic Non-Elite, it has long been common knowledge and beyond any real doubt that covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab. One could almost be forgiven for suspecting that that that this was yet another Noble Lie that our Priests of Permissible Knowledge created for us.