National Review
The Truth about Covid’s Origin Is Coming Out
By JIM GERAGHTY
June 15, 2023 10:01 AM
On the menu today: More and more blank spaces in the narrative of how the Covid pandemic started are getting filled in — whether or not the world wants to pay attention any longer. Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag report that multiple U.S. government officials have concluded that the first three people on Earth infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, were three scientists doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But hey, maybe those three all shopped at the Huanan Seafood Market together! Meanwhile, the public-research group Right to Know uncovers a State Department cable from July 2020 concluding that the “initial outbreak could have been contained in China if Beijing had not covered it up.”
U.S. Investigators: Covid’s ‘Patient Zero’ Was a Wuhan Institute of Virology Researcher
Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag write on their Substack, Public:
According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses. . . .
Now, answers increasingly look within reach. Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.
As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it.
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%.”
Way back in the closing days of the Trump administration, the U.S. State Department published a “fact sheet” declaring:
The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.
A few months later, in May 2021, a report by the Wall Street Journal’s Michael R. Gordon, Warren P. Strobel, and Drew Hinshaw offered more details:
Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s first report on the outbreak, published February 3, 2020, and entitled, “A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin,” was written in part by Ben Hu and Yan Zhu. The two men, who knew that they had been working with viruses either identical or extremely similar to this one, and who had been hospitalized with pneumonia-like symptoms right before the pandemic started in their own neighborhood, had the audacity to write, “Most importantly, strict regulations against the domestication and consumption of wildlife should be implemented.”
Why did so many people first believe that this was a case of someone eating bat soup? Because the Chinese government wanted the world to believe that. And one of the many reasons the Chinese government wanted the world to focus on wet markets was because the Wuhan Institute of Virology had an awful lot of military scientists around for an allegedly civilian institution working on public health.
Through Freedom of Information Act requests, the public-research group Right to Know uncovered U.S. State Department cables that shed more light on what the U.S. government knew about the outbreak and when. Vast swaths of those cables have been redacted, but the headlines are sufficient to tell the story: “[Wuhan Institute of Virology] personnel with possible [People’s Liberation Army] ties.” “Official Chinese websites show robust cooperation between WIV and PLA Academy of Military Medical Sciences” “PLA presence at WIV continued after construction completed.” “Cyber evidence of PLA shadow labs at WIV and Bioengineering University.”
As the Sunday Times of London report emphasized, this is not a declaration that Covid-19 was a biological weapon. But it indicates that the research being doing on viruses at the WIV — including gain-of-function research that attempts to make viruses more virulent and contagious — was being done in the context of attempting to develop new and more deadly biological weapons. Keep in mind, this research on how to make viruses more virulent and contagious was being conducted right in the middle of a city of 8 million people that was a major transportation and trade hub. If you were deliberately trying to cause the biggest global catastrophe imaginable, you wouldn’t make choices that were all that different than those the Chinese government made.
Meanwhile, another State Department cable from July 2020 concluded, “Beijing knew earlier than they admit” and “Initial outbreak could have been contained in China if Beijing had not covered it up.”
Folks such as Bill Gates run around saying the world needs a new and improved global-alert system for viral outbreaks. But it already has a fairly robust system to encourage doctors to talk to each other when they encounter a virus they’ve never seen before. Most doctors are not inherently or instinctively secretive when it comes to potential health threats and contagious diseases. The problem with the Covid pandemic wasn’t really that we didn’t have enough well-trained doctors looking for answers when an unusually high number of patients showed up with coughs.
By December 27, 2019, Zhang Jixian, the director of the respiratory and critical-care-medicine department of Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, sent a report declaring the discovery of a new “viral disease, probably infectious,” to the district-level center for disease control and prevention. By December 30, Dr. Li Wenliang sent a message to a group of other doctors warning them about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and urging them to take protective measures against infection.
The problem was that when those doctors tried to pull the alarm, the local, regional, and national Chinese government authorities above them kept shutting down their efforts until it was too late. Dr. Li Wenliang got dragged into a police station and was berated for “rumormongering” and for “publishing untrue statements,” and threatened with prosecution. A little more than a month later, the virus that he had desperately tried to warn his countrymen and the world about killed him.
For the first six weeks of the pandemic, local and national Chinese authorities insisted there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, even though doctors were catching the virus from their patients.
You can have all the bells and whistles you want on your global-alert system for viruses. It’s not going to work if the government is determined to lie, and the doctors are intimidated into submission and echo a false narrative.
The official death toll from the Covid pandemic is 6.8 million, but that is a wild undercount, because many regimes either lie about their numbers or are not capable of keeping track. The Economist magazine maintains a regularly updated database of excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, and calculates that the true number of Covid-related deaths worldwide is between 17.1 million and 30.6 million; its best guess is that Covid has killed 23.8 million people around the globe. The Chinese government would have you believe that the country has suffered fewer than 122,000 deaths from Covid. The Economist calculates that country has suffered 450,000 to 3.4 million more deaths than it ordinarily would have since the start of the pandemic.
President Biden doesn’t talk about the origin of Covid at all anymore. His administration has even dropped the rote, toothless, and increasingly pointless call for Beijing to cooperate with international investigations into how the pandemic started.
The Chinese government got away with it, in large part because enough leaders in the West don’t want to confront Beijing about the evidence. U.S. businesses from Procter & Gamble and General Motors to Tesla and J.P. Morgan all want to maintain their current operations in China. If they weren’t going to stop doing business in a country currently committing genocide, they’re not going to let a little thing like 23 million dead people get in the way.
At the G-7 conference last month, Biden sounded positively cheerful about the state of U.S.–Chinese relations:
Then this silly balloon that was carrying two freight cars’ worth of spying equipment was flying over the United States, and it got shot down, and everything changed in terms of talking to one another. I think you’re going to see that begin to thaw very shortly.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Beijing this week. The official statement about the trip says Blinken “will discuss the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to responsibly manage the U.S.-PRC relationship. He will also raise bilateral issues of concern, global and regional matters, and potential cooperation on shared transnational challenges.” CNN characterized the trip as the Biden administration aiming “to reset relations after [the] spy balloon incident.” (Perhaps there’s a reset button lying around the State Department that Blinken could use.)
There is no indication that the investigation into Covid’s origin, or the Chinese government’s refusal to cooperate with international inquiries, will be on the agenda.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, we’re quietly but steadily seeing more corporate executives who conclude that taking a side in political fights or culture wars just isn’t worth it, and that these efforts are destined to alienate more customers than they will attract.
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