This Sunday is the statutory deadline set by Congress for the U.S. government to declassify and publish what information it has on the origin of the pandemic as it relates to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In the past week, in the run-up to this expected disclosure, we’ve seen two explosive articles on the subject, one from the Times of London and the other on Substack by Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, each with new details pointing to the Wuhan lab as the origin of the pandemic and, in the case of the Times of London, even fingering Chinese bioweapons research.
As we prepare for this release, it’s worth thinking through how this has all unfolded. At first, it was forbidden – on Facebook, literally forbidden – to discuss a Wuhan lab leak as a potential source of the pandemic. Over time, new pieces of reporting kept pointing to the lab as a legitimate subject of inquiry, even as the New York Times, embarrassingly, ran article after article pretending the question had been answered, and that a natural origin was essentially confirmed. Now more than three years later, it’s no longer forbidden, either technically or socially or politically, to wonder if it may have been the lab. In fact, a majority of Americans now believe that to be the case.
But suppressing the discussion for this long did some work: the wing of the virology community that strongly supports research alternately known as “gain of function” or “dual use research of concern” knew that a focus on the lab would lead to a reimplementation of the moratorium on that research and, if we were lucky, its total ban.
Instead, we’ve seen a massive proliferation of that type of research, increasing the chances we’ll have another pandemic in the not-too-distant future. With the reality of the origin finally emerging into public focus, my guess is that the new struggle will be between China and the United States, with the U.S. hoping to pin the origin on research being done in the lab in collaboration with the Chinese military, so that we can distance ourselves from risky research that was also being done there with U.S. dollars. By cordoning off the blame to the People’s Liberation Army, the U.S. supporters of risky research can justify continuing by arguing that it’s only those reckless Chinese generals that we have to worry about, not our own projects. So that’s something to keep in mind as you digest the coming news over the next few days.
Consider that Congress narrowed its demand that the U.S. declassify information related to the Wuhan lab. Why limit it like that when we know there were other researchers around the world collaborating with the Wuhan lab?
Today at The Intercept, I have a new story on links between a potential Covid patient zero, a top researcher at the Wuhan lab, and U.S. funding.
DOCUMENTS LINK POTENTIAL COVID PATIENT ZERO TO U.S.-FUNDED RESEARCH IN WUHAN
One of the first Wuhan researchers reportedly sickened with Covid in fall 2019, Ben Hu, was getting U.S. financial support for risky gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the transparency advocacy organization White Coat Waste Project.
The funding came in three grants totaling $41 million, doled out by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, the agency then headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Hu is listed as lead researcher on the grants.
The news that U.S. intelligence had learned that three Wuhan Institute of Virology lab workers had been hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November 2019, significantly before the outbreak at the city’s seafood market, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in May 2021. But the revelation had curiously little impact on the broader debate over the origin of the pandemic, even as it would invalidate, if confirmed, the claim that the pandemic originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market when the virus allegedly jumped from an animal to a human. No such animal has been identified, but new reporting by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, sourced to three government sources familiar with a State Department investigation, has identified the three lab workers as Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
The NIAID grants list Hu as a lead investigator in the projects being funded. Hu is a top deputy to Shi Zhengli, known in the virology world as “batwoman” for her work extracting samples of viruses from bats in Chinese caves. The FOIA documents were first obtained by White Coat Waste in 2021 but given new relevance with the reporting of Hu’s involvement.
The Times of London, meanwhile, also recently reported new details about activity in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the run-up to the pandemic, similarly sourced to three investigators with the U.S. State Department. That report includes allegations about the Wuhan labs’ collaboration with Chinese military scientists, buttressing what had once been dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory: that the virus was connected to bioweapons research. “In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army,” the Times reported. “In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.”
Much of the focus of the Times investigation is on a virus found in a mine where workers were sickened in 2012, leading to hospitalizations and deaths. Another key question probed by the State Department investigators relates to a project proposed to the Pentagon by Shi and two collaborators, Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. The proposal, submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, entailed inserting a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus. It was rejected, but speculation remains as to whether some of the research was conducted anyway.
“The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak,” the Times reported. “They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.” A key hallmark of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is its furin cleavage site.
Congress has mandated the U.S. government to declassify information related to the pandemic’s origin and the Wuhan Institute of virology by Sunday, June 18.
Also be sure to check out this wild story by my colleague Murtaza Hussain on the FBI grooming a developmentally challenged 16-year-old into being a fake financier of terrorism and then arresting him for it.
I hope that this possible "outsourcing" to China of the development of a potentially extremely lethal bioweapon is effectively investigated and that heads roll (metaphorically speaking, as I am against the death penalty) as a result.
However, and this is a big "however", the USA needs China and the world needs the USA and China to be positively engaged in what has to become as soon as possible an effective international effort to stop both making climate change worse as well as the extermination of increasingly more and more of the living species of plants, animals and fungi that make life in this planet sustainable, including the endurance of our own species.
This is the most important issue confronting humanity today, it is already happening and even if we stopped doing right now the things that make this steadily building-up catastrophe possible, what is already happening may stay at the present level and even get worse for centuries to come, unless there is some way to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, besides stopping our contributions to its continuous buildup.
So confronting China in what it is necessary while trying to achieve the degree cooperation that is required for universal survival is a difficult circle to square. But that is what statesmanship is for, assuming both sides have at least the minimum necessary of this resource available, which I think right now is the quintillion-dollar question here.
Today's in the Washington Post there is an article that I think is worth having a look at:
Opinion Biden wants a ‘thaw’ with China. What would that take?
By Bates Gill, Nikki Haley, Zongyuan Zoe Liu, Michael Mazza, Andrew Browne, Christopher Wood and Emily de La Bruyère
June 16, 2023 at 4:11 p.m. EDT
Most of the comments are cautiously in favor of a thaw and make some suggestions to this end that might be worth considering.
But the following think that Biden's idea of a rapprochement is a very bad one for the reasons they give, as it is to be expected of them:
Nikki Haley (aspiring to be the Republican presidential candidate next year and the Ex-US Ambassador to the UN, appointed by Trump. (A list of all the evil things China is up to against the USA.)
Michael Mazza is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior nonresident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute. (Things will never change, so the USA must face up to China for ever.)
Emily de La Bruyère is co-founder of Horizon Advisory and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies with a focus on China policy. (Biden's "thaw" = "appeasement.")