Making the “lab leak (theory) almost certain,” the documents in question, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, contain the blueprints for developing these engineered “spike proteins,” the job of which was to infect human cells and become “inserted into SARS-Covid backbones.”

All of this took place at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) starting in December 2018. About a year later, the first “cases” of COVID injection were reported in China, followed by more cases in the United States and beyond.

It was in late 2019 when the “pandemic” started to become a global event, and none of it would have been possible apart from U.S. government funding that was funneled into EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit organization that for many years has funded bioweapons development and experimentation.

“The documents also show how EcoHealth tried to deliberately mislead the Pentagon on how risky the experiments were to secure funding,” tweeted Sen. Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Australia).

“The team sought to synthesize spike proteins with furin cleavage sites that had been designed to bind to human receptors more easily … The furin has been one of the focal points of debate about Covid-19’s origin, with some experts claiming it could only have been acquired through lab experiments.”

(Related: Check out what EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower Dr. Andrew Huff had to say to Mike Adams about DARPA’s involvement in the creation of deadly bioweapons in Wuhan, China.)

EcoHealth plays dumb

The proposed blueprint in question was ultimately denied by the United States Department of Defense (DoD), but what it contains was still used as a blueprint elsewhere for how to create the bioweapon that would ultimately be dubbed “COVID-19.”

The same document exposes EcoHealth for deliberately trying to mislead the Pentagon as to just how risky the experiments proposed within in it really were. This deception is how EcoHealth secured U.S. taxpayer funding for the later creation of COVID.

EcoHealth has since responded to the allegations by calling them “incomplete” and “false.” The nonprofit insists that all of this is “based on misunderstanding of edits and comments on the document, and based on misleading out-of-context quotations and a lack of understanding the process by which federal grants are awarded.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) disagrees. A longtime vocal supporter of the lab leak theory, Paul says the unearthed documents reinforce the “deception” that was used by EcoHealth and other key players directly tied to the Wuhan lab that allegedly unleashed the bioweapon.

“This latest [document] leak makes the case for a lab leak almost certain,” said Matt Ridley, a biologist and science writer who has written extensively about the lab leak theory.

“A reckless experiment, known at the time to be reckless, probably caused the death of millions of people. Scientists and the media conspired to conceal the evidence. Let that sink in.”

U.S. Right to Know is once again credited with uncovering the documents. Said documents outline the nature of the grant proposal, which was called “Project DEFUSE: Defeating the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses.” The entire thing talks about the deliberate engineering of high-risk coronaviruses that are capable of spilling over from animals to humans – and that is exactly what appears to have happened with the deliberate engineering and “leak” of COVID from the Wuhan lab.

Learn more about the latest COVID revelations coming to light at Plague.info.

Sources for this article include:

• DailyMail.co.uk
• Twitter.com
• NaturalNews.com

According to a July 12, 2023, article by Ryan Grim published by The Intercept,¹ U.S. House Republicans investigating the origin of COVID-19 “appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents … that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020.”

The paper in question is “The Proximal Origin of Sars-Cov-2,”² a letter to the editor of Nature Medicine published March 17, 2020. This letter ended up being widely cited by the media as evidence of a scientific consensus that the virus emerged naturally and jumped species.

The House Subcommittee on the origin of COVID-19 devoted an entire report to this paper, showing how the authors presented a false conclusion to the public while privately believing the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The report was published July 11, 2023, the same day the subcommittee also held a hearing on the “Proximal Origin” paper, in which they questioned Robert Garry, Ph.D., of Tulane University and Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., of Scripps, two of the scientists involved in its creation. The Intercept explains how more information than intended ended up out in the open:³

“According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using ‘Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,’ indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. Word, however, retains the original image when an image is cropped, as do many other apps …

The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth. All the files can be found here.”⁴

The original subcommittee report has now been taken down.

Background

February 1, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) convened a conference call with 11 scientists to discuss COVID-19.

On that conference call, Drs. Fauci and Collins were warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — and that the virus appeared to be the result of genetic engineering. Minutes from the call reveal a lab escape was in fact the consensus among the gathered experts on that day.

Yet later that very day, a first draft of “The Proximal Origin” paper had been written, and three days later, on February 4, Fauci was sent a copy for editing and approval. The authors have maintained that new information changed their minds, but what, exactly, could they have learned in that short time? As it turns out, nothing.

According to The Intercept, “Slack messages and emails show that their initial inclination toward a lab escape remained long past that time.” So, as initially suspected, the “Proximal Origin” paper appears to have been nothing more than an attempt to control the narrative.

Zoonotic Origin Pushers Suspected Lab Leak

“In a Slack exchange February 2, 2020, between Andersen and Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, it becomes clear how seriously the authors took the hypothesis that COVID may have leaked from a lab … before they ultimately became dedicated to publicly dismissing it,” Grim writes.⁵

The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory. ~ Kristian Andersen, Ph.D.

In that Slack exchange, Andersen wrote:

“I believe RaTG13 is from Yuanan, which is about as far away from Wuhan as you can be and still be in China. What are the chances of finding viruses that are 96% identical given that distance? Seems strange given how many SARS-like viruses we have in bats.”

RaTG13 refers to a virus found in a Chinese mine in 2013 after several miners had fallen ill with COVID-like symptoms. This virus was stored and researched at the WIV. Rambaut replied to Andersen’s comment:⁶

“I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good.

The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need irrefutable evidence. My position is that the natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

Rambaut also noted:⁷

“Given the shitshow that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes.”

While Andersen agreed with Rambaut’s comment, saying “Yup. I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion,” he still, clearly, did not believe that COVID was caused by zoonotic transfer. Earlier in that same Slack thread, Andersen stressed that:⁸

“The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory. I absolutely agree that we can’t prove one way or the other, but we never will be able to — however, that doesn’t mean that by default the data is currently much more suggestive of a natural origin as opposed to e.g. passage. It is not — the furin cleavage site is very hard to explain.”

The choice of words is ironic, considering the lab leak theory was dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory in large part thanks to Andersen’s “Proximal Origin” paper, which boldly proclaimed that “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” and that “we do not believe any type of laboratory scenario is plausible.”

How Involved Was Fauci?

During the July 11, 2023, subcommittee hearing, Andersen insisted that Fauci and Collins had not influenced the conclusions presented in “Proximal Origin,” but doubts linger.

February 5, 2020, Andersen wrote that suspicions of genetic engineering and bioweapons research was “definitely not going away,” and that he was being approached by journalists about it. “There might be a time where we need to tackle that more directly head on,” he wrote, “but I’ll let the likes of Jeremy [Farrar] and Tony [Fauci] figure out how to do that.”

And while Fauci and Collins didn’t figure out how to quash the theory for good, they sure tried. April 16, 2020, Collins emailed Fauci expressing dismay that the “Proximal Origin” paper had failed to quash the lab leak hypothesis, and asked Fauci if there was anything else the NIH could do to “put down this very destructive conspiracy theory.”⁹

The next day, Fauci cited the paper from the White House podium and told reporters that COVID-19 was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”¹⁰

There are also questions about whether Fauci and other government officials may have used private emails to cover up their coverup. During the hearing, the subcommittee chairman reported that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is investigating the conduct of Dr. David M. Morens, senior scientific adviser to Fauci.

The investigation was launched after the subcommittee released a 2021 email by Morens to several “Proximal Origins” authors, including Garry and Andersen, in which he admitted that he was using a personal Gmail account to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).¹¹

Pressure From on High

In a February 16, 2020, email, Eddie Holmes, another one of the “Proximal Origins” authors, also alluded to “pressure” being applied, although he didn’t name names:

“Well, that’s suspicious … he comes back 15 minutes after I submit? A natural phenomenon? I’m not sure we can exclude the hypothesis of deliberately engineered responsibility shirking. Anyway, it’s done. Sorry the last bit had to be done without you … pressure from on high.”

According to Grim, “officials with the communications department at the NIH had been asking about the status of the submission,” and “Taken as a whole, the messages undercut the claims that the NIH took a hands-off approach to the paper.”

‘Impossible’ to Reject Lab Leak Theory

Andersen’s reply to the journal Nature also reveals that dismissing the lab leak theory was impossible from the very beginning, based on the data. Before the “Proximal Origin” paper was submitted to Nature Medicine, it had been pitched to — and rejected — by Nature.

The rejection letter specified that one reviewer thought the lab leak had to be conclusively rejected, lest it fuel conspiracy theories. According to that reviewer, once new pangolin sequences were published, “a lab origin will be extremely unlikely.” In a February 20, 2020, reply to Nature, Andersen wrote:

“Had that been the case, we would of course have included that — but the more sequences we see from pangolins (and we have been analyzing/discussing these very carefully) the more unlikely it seems that they’re the intermediate hosts.

Unfortunately, none of this helps refute a lab origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do) and not dismissed out of hand as another ‘conspiracy’ theory. We all really, really wish that we could do that (that’s how this got started), but unfortunately it’s not possible given the data.”

However, by the time the paper was submitted to Nature Medicine, it had been further edited to more strongly dismiss the possibility of a lab leak.

A Deeper Cover-Up at Play?

According to Republicans on the subcommittee on the origin of COVID-19, the “Proximal Origin” paper may have been unduly influenced by Fauci and other government officials who sought to downplay the possibility that COVID-19 might have emerged from the WIV — a lab with a long history of U.S. funding of questionable gain-of-function research. Subcommittee chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, said:¹²

“We are examining whether government officials, regardless of who they are, unfairly and perhaps biasedly tipped the scales toward a preferred origin theory …

And, overall, we’re examining whether scientific integrity was disregarded in favor of political expediency — maybe to conceal or diminish the government’s relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology …

Or maybe to avoid blaming China for any complicity, intended or otherwise, in a pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans and has had a crushing effect on all humankind itself.”

Meanwhile, Garry, Andersen and certain Democrats tried to shift blame onto others, such as Sir Jeremy Farrar. However, by doing so, they only “highlight how insidious the process was,” independent journalist Sam Husseini — who live-tweeted the hearing — writes.¹³ Quoting from Husseini’s Substack article:¹⁴

“… Jeremy Farrar … played a crucial role in pulling together the group of people who would sign ‘Proximal Origin’ … he was also a signer of the Lancet letter,¹⁵ the other main pillar of propaganda from 2020 on COVID origins.

Farrar had been head of the highly influential Wellcome Trust in Britain and is now chief scientist for the WHO as it attempts a ‘power grab.’ This could hardly be more disturbing, but none of this was pointed out in the hearing.

Time and again, Farrar’s name was invoked to let Fauci off the hook and never was it brought up to show how there was a deeper coverup going on.”

Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier was also named as taking part in the meetings that led to the publication of “Proximal Origin.” As noted by Husseini, no one bothered to explain the importance of his presence either.

Fouchier launched a firestorm of controversy in 2011 when he used serial passage to make the avian flu airborne.¹⁶ The New York Times warned that his work might lead to an “engineered doomsday.”¹⁷

“But Fouchier didn’t sign any either the Lancet letter or ‘Proximal Origin’ — quite likely because his doing so would have made alarm bells go off,” Husseini writes.¹⁸

“This shows how the propaganda put out at the beginning of the pandemic was highly orchestrated to hinder people from seeing the possibility of lab origins for COVID and the dire threats involved. This raises further questions as to the wider agendas at play.”

• ^{1, 3, 5, 6} The Intercept July 12, 2023
• ² Nature Medicine March 17, 2020; 26: 450-452
• ⁴ Document Cloud Subcommittee on Coronavirus
• ^7, 8, 9 The Nation July 12, 2023
• ¹⁰ USRTK April 11, 2023
• ¹¹ The Intercept June 29, 2023
• ¹² White House Oversight Committee July 11, 2023
• ^13, 14, 18 Sam Husseini Substack July 13, 2023
• ¹⁵ The Lancet March 7, 2020; 395(10226): E42-E43
• ¹⁶ Science. 2012 Jun 22; 336(6088): 1534–1541
• ¹⁷ NYT January 7, 2012

Article cross-posted from Dr. Mercola’s site.

• In January 2022, House Oversight Committee Republicans released a batch of emails sent to and from the National Institutes of Health. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Jimmy Tobias at The Intercept also forced the release of unredacted NIH correspondence
• The emails reveal there was great concern among NIH leadership, as SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be a genetically engineered virus that somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China
• The emails show they were nervous about the possibility that they’d funded the creation of this virus, and that they were determined to suppress questions about its origin
• A group of scientists convened by Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, published a paper in which they claimed the virus was decidedly not the result of intentional engineering. They did admit accidental creation in a lab could not be ruled out, but that natural evolution was the most likely scenario. Some of these same scientists had previously shared details indicative of genetic engineering in emails to Fauci
• The “Proximal Origin” paper, which was edited by Fauci and “debunked” the lab leak theory without any evidence, became the most-read published paper in history. More than 2,000 media outlets have cited it to support their propaganda

In January 2022, House Oversight Committee Republicans released a batch of emails sent to and from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).^1,2,3 A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Jimmy Tobias at The Intercept⁴ also forced the release of unredacted NIH correspondence in late November 2022, just as Dr. Anthony Fauci prepared to retire from his position as director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The emails reveal what many had suspected all along, namely that SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be a genetically engineered virus that somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. (In a January 17, 2023, Twitter thread,⁵ molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., summarized the lab-origin hypothesis.)

The correspondence also reveal that a) NIH leaders were nervous about the possibility that they’d funded the creation of this virus, and b) they were determined to suppress questions about its origin.

Summary of Key Findings

As reported by the House Oversight Committee:⁶

“Excerpts of emails released today reveal the following:

• January 27, 2020: Dr. [Anthony] Fauci knew NIAID [National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] had funded EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV was a subgrantee of EcoHealth, and EcoHealth was not in compliance with its grant reporting, in particular a grant that NIAID knew had gain-of-function potential on novel bat coronaviruses.
• February 1, 2020: Dr. Fauci, [then-NIH director] Dr. [Francis] Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. On the conference call, Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV and may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.
• February 4, 2020: After speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, four participants of the conference call abandoned their belief the virus originated from the Wuhan lab and authored a paper⁷ entitled ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.’ Prior to final publication in Nature Medicine, the paper was sent to Dr. Fauci for editing and approval.
• April 16, 2020: More than two months after the original conference call, Dr. Collins emailed Dr. Fauci expressing dismay that the Nature Medicine article — which they saw prior to publication and were given the opportunity to edit — did not squash the lab leak hypothesis and asks if the NIH can do more to ‘put down’ the lab leak hypothesis.
• April 17, 2020: After Dr. Collins explicitly asked for more public pressure, Dr. Fauci cited the Nature Medicine paper from the White House podium likely in an effort to further stifle the hypothesis COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab.”

Fauci Tipped Off About Lab Leak Possibility

January 31, 2020, Fauci received an email from Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, asking him to call Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., an evolutionary biologist and professor in the department of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. As reported by The Intercept January 19, 2023:⁸

“Fauci had his phone call with Andersen that night, and what he heard clearly disturbed him. In an email to Farrar after the call, he wrote the following:

‘I told [Andersen] that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities.

I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5′ … What were Andersen’s concerns? And why were they so dire they might merit a call to the FBI?

Andersen laid them out plainly in an email to Fauci that same evening. ‘The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,’ Andersen wrote in the email.

‘I should mention,’ he added, ‘that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.'”

NIH Funded Risky Research at the WIV

The following day, February 1, 2020, at 2 p.m., Fauci, Farrar, Collins, Andersen and several other virologists had their conference call, and Andersen clearly wasn’t the only one who had noticed tell-tale signs of genetic engineering. Farrar himself wrote “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release — I am honestly at 50!” ⁹

According to The Intercept,¹⁰ Fauci spent that morning “brushing up on what sorts of grants and collaborations his agency was involved in with research institutions in China.”

In all likelihood, he discovered (if he was somehow previously unaware, which seems doubtful) that the NIH had provided research grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn subcontracted coronavirus experiments to the WIV — including an experiment involving humanized mice that were infected with chimeric hybrids of SARS-related bat coronaviruses.¹¹

According to The Intercept, it’s highly unlikely that these experiments resulted in SARS-CoV-2, as the viruses are too dissimilar, “but it does raise questions about what other kinds of experiments were going on in Wuhan and haven’t been disclosed.”

NIH-Linked Scientists Suspected Lab Leak From the Start

February 2, 2020, Farrar circulated a set of notes summarizing the discussion, which he said was to be treated “in total confidence.”¹² Michael (Mike) Farzan, Ph.D., an expert on the entry processes of enveloped viruses, was bothered by the presence of a furin cleavage site — a novel feature that allows SARS-CoV-2 the ability to infect cells in the human airways.

According to Farrar’s note, Farzan “has a hard time explain[ing] that as an event outside the lab.” Farrar’s summary goes on to state that:¹³

“… the likely explanation could be something as simple as passage SARS-live CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines (under BSL-2) for an extended period of time, accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans via gain of furin site (from tissue culture) and adoption to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passage …

So, I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature — accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”

A note from professor and microbiologist Robert (Bob) Garry, Ph.D.,¹⁴ reveals he had similar concerns:

“… I aligned the nCoV with the 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD [receptor binding domain] the S proteins are essential [sic] identical at the amino acid level — well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds [sic] the furin site.

S2 is over its whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide [sic] that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function — that and you don’t change any other amino acids in S2?

I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level — its [sic] stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.

Another scenario is that the progenitor of nCoV was a bat virus with the perfect furin cleavage site generated over evolutionary times. In this scenario RaTG13 the WIV virus was generated by a perfect deletion of 12 nucleotides while essentially not changing any other S2 amino acid [sic]. Even more implausible IMO [in my opinion]. That is the big if.”

In other words, in the earliest days of the pandemic, the general consensus among virologists in communication with the NIH was that a WIV lab leak was not only plausible, but perhaps the most likely. The correspondence also leaves no doubt about the fact that Fauci and Collins wanted to silence this theory.

The Cover-Up Begins

In a February 2, 2020, email, Collins stated that he was “coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely,” and warned that “voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate” lest they convene a panel of experts to address the matter, and that such conspiracies could do “great potential harm to science and international harmony.”

Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, who participated in the call, also warned his colleagues that continuing the discussion about a lab leak “would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”¹⁵

Fauci, for his part, appears to have made the decision to suppress the lab leak theory that same day (February 2). In an email, he wrote:¹⁶

“Like all of us, I do not know how this evolved, but given the concerns of so many people and the threat of further distortions on social media, it is essential that we move quickly.”

According to The Intercept, Fauci, Farrar and Collins alerted officials at the World Health Organization in the hopes they’d convene an expert panel to investigate, but “WHO apparently declined to do so at the time.” The group was well aware of the risks involved, though, were the lab leak theory to gain legs, so a plan to discourage further “accusations” was apparently hatched.

Hastily Written Paper Sought to Discourage Bioweapon Idea

Just two days later, on February 4, 2020, Fauci and Collins received the first draft of the article, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” later published in Nature Medicine.¹⁷

Three of the authors, Andersen, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney, were on the February 1, 2020, conference call. Andersen, Garry, and another “Proximal Origin” author, W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, have also received large NIH grants in recent years,¹⁸ so this paper was not written by uninterested and independent parties.

The original draft is still secret. All we have is an email reply from Fauci, in which he appears to flag the inclusion of serial passage through humanized mice. This suggests the issue of animal passage was raised, but then immediately scrapped.

The Nature Medicine article roundly dismissed the idea that the virus was the result of deliberate engineering, proposing instead that, despite a dearth of evidence, it most likely evolved naturally. (Two potential natural-evolution theories were described.) They didn’t conclusively dismiss the possibility of a lab leak, though — only the idea that it was “deliberately” engineered. As noted in the paper:¹⁹

“Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here.

However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Lab Origin Was Never Ruled Out

The “other theories of its origin” described in the “Proximal Origin” paper was the possibility that it might have been the result of “selection during passage,” which is a routine laboratory practice. In other words, it seems they were most concerned with dispelling any rumors about it being intentionally created, which would place it in the category of a bioweapon.

As reported by The Intercept, Farrar, Fauci and Collins certainly had not ruled out the possibility of a lab origin altogether:²⁰

“The scientists seem by this point to have made a sharp distinction between a scenario in which the virus was deliberately engineered in a lab and a scenario in which the virus was generated during serial passage experiments in a lab.

‘Eddie would be 60:40 lab side,’ Farrar added. ‘I remain 50:50.’

‘Yes, I’d be interested in the proposal of accidental lab passage in animals (which ones?),’ Collins wrote.

‘?? Serial passage in ACE2-transgenic mice,’ Fauci responded.

‘Exactly!’ Farrar replied.

‘Surely that wouldn’t be done in a BSL-2 lab?’ wrote Collins, referring to biosafety level 2 labs, which do not have the most stringent safety protocols.

‘Wild West…’ was Farrar’s response, an apparent reference to lab practices in China or possibly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself.

In the above exchange, the health officials seem to be contemplating the possibility that the repeated passage of a coronavirus through genetically modified mice in an insufficiently secure lab could have resulted in the accidental emergence and release of SARS-CoV-2.

In a later email exchange, Farrar, quoting Garry, noted that serial passage in animals had been proved to result in the appearance of furin cleavage sites in other viruses, specifically the H5N1 flu virus. ‘There are a couple passage of H5N1 in chicken papers — the furin site appears in steps.'”

Similarly, there’s this exchange between Christian Drosten, Ph.D., and Andersen on February 8.²¹ Drosten wrote:

“Can someone help me with one question: didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it? Who came up with this story in the beginning? Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”

Andersen’s reply read:

“Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.

As to publishing this document in a journal, I am currently not in favor of doing so. I believe that publishing something that is open-ended could backfire at this stage.”

Andersen’s reluctance notwithstanding, the paper was accepted for publication a month later, March 17, 2020 — and the possibility of the virus being the result of serial passage remained.

Most-Read Propaganda Paper Ever

The influence of the “Proximal Origin” paper cannot be overstated. As reported by The Intercept,²² it’s been accessed more than 5.7 million times and cited by more than 2,000 media outlets, making it one of the most-read papers ever published. It’s fair to say this propaganda piece was “milked for all its worth” to uphold the illusion of a natural evolution consensus.

Most media outlets also overstated the paper’s conclusion. While it did not present any actual evidence to support the natural evolution theory, and admitted it might have been created through serial passaging in a lab, outlets like ABC News boldly declared, “Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes COVID-19 ‘Is Not a Laboratory Construct,'”²³ as if the issue had been conclusively settled based on the scientific evidence at hand.

Questions Could Not Be Quelled

The Nature Medicine article didn’t stem the flow of questions, though, a fact decried by Collins in a mid-April 2020 email to Fauci:

“Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum … I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this. But probably didn’t get much visibility. Anything more we can do? Ask the National Academy to weigh in?”

Fauci replied, “I would not do anything about this right now. It is a shiny object that will go away in times [sic].” He was wrong, of course, and the reason questions didn’t go away was because emerging evidence kept strengthening the lab leak theory, while there is nothing with which to support natural evolution.

As Sergei Pond, a computational virologist at Temple University, told The Intercept,²⁴ “there was no data then, and there is no data now, that would definitively indicate that a lab origin like the one contemplated in ‘Proximal Origin’ is not at least plausible.”

Having read the unredacted emails, David Relman, a professor of microbiology, immunology and medicine at Stanford University, added:²⁵

“When I first saw it [the Proximal Origin paper] in March 2020, the paper read to me as a conclusion in search of an argument. Among its many problems, it failed to consider in a serious fashion the possibility of an unwitting and unrecognized accidental leak during aggressive efforts to grow coronaviruses from bat and other field samples.

It also assumed that researchers in Wuhan have told the world about every virus and every sequence that was in their laboratories in 2019. But these [unredacted emails] actually provide evidence that the authors considered a few additional lab-associated scenarios, early in their discussions.

But then they rushed to judgment, and the lab scenarios fell out of favor. It appears as if a combination of a scant amount of data and an unspoken bias against the [lab origin] scenario diminished the idea in their minds.”

Virologists Under the Microscope

As reported by The Washington Post,²⁶ virologists are now under the microscope like never before, and the NIH is said to be “preparing an overhaul of the policies on government-funded research.” Draft recommendations²⁷ from the biosecurity advisory board were released January 20, 2023.

Clearly, paranoia is high, and there’s good reason for that. Not only do we have the unredacted NIH emails showing there were grave concerns about COVID-19 being the result of a lab leak, and that those concerns were “allayed” by passing propaganda for “science,” but researchers have also published research showing they’re now conducting gain-of-function research on SARS-CoV-2.²⁸

Who in their right mind would think that was a good idea? The fact that reckless dual-use research into dangerous pathogens is taking place on the daily is precisely why getting to the bottom of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is so important. If this kind of research contributed to COVID-19, then clearly we need to make sure it cannot happen again.

I believe one of the primary reasons why the lab leak theory is being so heavily disputed is because acknowledging it as true would force Congress to rein in the research industry. But we cannot afford to ignore it, because gain-of-function research capabilities pose a truly existential threat to mankind as a whole.²⁹

Inspector General Report Blasts NIH for String of Errors

Interestingly, January 25, 2023, the U.S. Office of Inspector General released a report³⁰ detailing the NIH’s failure to properly monitor and review potentially hazardous coronavirus research. As reported by the Daily Mail:³¹

“EcoHealth Alliance was awarded $8 million in Government research grants between 2014 and 2021, which it subcontracted to research facilities. The WIV was one of eight teams awarded grants at that time.

Today’s audit said there was a lack of oversight by the NIH and EcoHealth at the Chinese facility and other labs that benefitted from Government grants.

The report said: ‘Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, we found that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements.

‘Although NIH and EcoHealth had established monitoring procedures, we found deficiencies in complying with those procedures limited NIH and EcoHealth’s ability to effectively monitor federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action’ …

Investigators say EcoHealth also did not submit proper progress reports on the use of its fund in a timely manner, with information coming in two years late. It also says the NIH failed to terminate its grant with EcoHealth after the non-profit broke protocols.”

Justin Goodman, senior vice president of Advocacy and Public Policy at the White Coat Waste Project commented on the report:³²

“This audit confirms what we have been documenting since early 2020 when we first exposed NIH’s funding of the Wuhan lab: EcoHealth Alliance shipped tax dollars to Wuhan for dangerous animal experiments that probably caused the pandemic, violated federal laws and policies and wasted tax dollars.

Yet, the Wuhan lab remains eligible for even more taxpayer money for animal tests and just since the pandemic began, EcoHealth has raked in at least $46million in new federal funds from the DOD, USAID, NIH, and NSF.

As the group that first exposed and ended EcoHealth’s calamitous collaboration with the Wuhan animal lab, we’re calling on Congress to defund these rogue organizations once and for all. Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll reckless white coats who waste money, break the law and place public health in peril. Stop the money, stop the madness.”

US Government Stonewalls FOIA Requests

As investigators try to get to the truth, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is doing everything it can to prevent it from coming out. As reported by Gary Ruskin,³³ executive director and co-founder of U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), in 2022, as the HHS was slammed with FOIA requests relating to COVID-19, they added four extra layers of legal review within the HHS legal department.

These attorneys scoured each and every document to make sure anything potentially incriminating was properly redacted before release. “This plainly appears to be an effort to delay or block release of documents about the origin of COVID-19,” Ruskin wrote. “What is HHS hiding? We hope Congress will investigate.”

The good news is, the Republican House now has the ability to launch such investigations, and I hope they will. The problem is that it would be dangerous to prove a cover-up, as it would turn everything upside-down. Health agencies, universities and any number of other agencies would have to be retooled. So, getting to the bottom of this affair will require people who believe the truth is worth the pain.

• ¹ Farrar Fauci Communications
• ² House Oversight Committee COVID Origins
• ³ YourNews January 11, 2022
• ^{4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25} Intercept January 19, 2023
• ⁵ Twitter Richard Ebright January 17, 2023
• ⁶ House Oversight Committee January 11, 2022
• ⁷ Nature Medicine April 2020; 26(4): 450-452
• ¹³ YouTube The Hill January 2022
• ¹⁴ Bob Garry Bio
• ^17, 19 Nature Medicine March 17, 2020; 26: 451-452
• ²³ ABC News March 27, 2020
• ^26, 28 Washington Post January 20, 2023
• ²⁷ Biosecurity Advisory Board Proposed Framework for the Future of Science January 2023
• ²⁹ National Review January 22, 2023 (Archived)
• ³⁰ DHHS Office of Inspector General January 2023
• ^31, 32 Daily Mail January 25, 2023
• ³³ Twitter Gary Ruskin December 5, 2022