It Was Always a Lab Product

The House Oversight Committee has exhaustively confirmed what should have already been well-known about the origins of COVID-19 but for the concerted effort by the governments of China and the USA with the cooperation of zealously anti-Trump media to promote a lie.

The initial rise of COVID-19 cases in the northeast USA and Western Europe simultaneously began in mid-March 2020 and initially peaked in mid-April. However, virologists had already analyzed the virus in January, and Anthony Fauci knew he had a problem. It was already clear that the virus was very unlikely to have a natural origin.

NIH Director Francis Collins and CDC Director Robert Redfield had both opined that it was probably lab-created. Collins would soon change his mind when the political and funding implications of the virus' likely origin became clear.

[For an excellent detailed summary of the history of the effort to conceal or distort the origins of the virus I highly recommend this article. ]

The campaign to create an official "proximal origin" narrative was behind the creation of a paper that is still touted as the definitive refutation of the lab origin theory. It was published just as the pandemic was beginning. It became official dogma that the lab-leak theory had been debunked and the media obediently followed that line and cited this paper as the ultimate source.

Prior to completing the article, the authors were on a conference call with Anthony Fauci, Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar in the U.K., and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, who together controlled over $70 billion in research funds. The unambiguous purpose of the call was to find ways to challenge the notion that the virus had been engineered. The authors were in no doubt what the preferred finding would be. Not so much as a thumb on the scale as a full fist. Finding the wrong answer could jeopardize funding for virology in general, gain of function in particular and presumably not be a boon to the career of any author who came up with the wrong answer.

The ”definitive paper” made two essential claims.

1. It was likely from a natural origin.

Despite testing hundreds of samples from the Wuhan wet market five miles from the lab where the virus actually emerged, the COVID-19 virus was not found in any specimen. COVID-19 was not found in any specimen in any animal species prior to the human outbreak. ( In 2021, an estimated 50% of white-tailed deer in North America were Covid-19 seropositive, an indication of contagiousness that meant the virus should have already been widespread in animal populations prior to the human outbreak if there were a natural, non-lab origin.)

Nevertheless, the authors found that there were viruses in the Wuhan wet market that were 96% similar to COVID-19 and breezily concluded that a mutation could have happened to create the pandemic virus. Other virologists have found that claim to be preposterous. It would be like saying it would not be surprising if a pair of chimpanzee parents were to produce a fully human offspring given that their DNA has a 98% similarity to that of humans.

2. The authors asserted that there was no known methodological pathway to create the COVID-19 virus from known coronaviruses.

However, in earlier private communications, one of the paper's authors had written that “a grad student could have done it” indicating that the means to build the spike structure was known. Wuhan partner EcoLab had even applied for a DARPA grant in 2018 to do exactly that so the notion that this was a yet unknown methodology was more than just a stretch.

We do not know which specific coronaviruses viruses could have been used as the bases of the creation of COVID-19 because (a) the Wuhan lab was deficient in reporting throughout the grant period (b) destroyed all viral samples and all records after the outbreak and (c) called upon NIH to destroy whatever records they did have pursuant to the data sharing agreement which records were dutifully trashed by NIH.

And of course, there is the Chinese researcher at that lab who (a) applied for a vaccine patent within weeks of the outbreak--golly, almost as if he already had samples of the virus for several months and then (b) jumped or was pushed off the roof of the Wuhan Virology Institute. Then there is the saga of the fellow at that lab who was and then was not patient zero... But if you can't trust the Chinese Communist Party and Anthony Fauci, then who can you trust?

Fauci and Collins put institutional interests and their own reputations ahead of ethical and professional obligations to provide truthful answers to the American people. They corrupted science and scientists complicit in the lie along with major media outlets and undeservedly prominent journalists. The history of their betrayal needs to be firmly established. Americans' trust in science, in our institutions and in our media has never been lower, and Fauci and Collins are a major contributing factor in that decline. They should be remembered accordingly.