As discussed on today’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, there isn’t a ton that is new in the Times of London’s big in-depth report on the origins of Covid-19. But it is good to see a globally respected newspaper taking all of the available information and laying it out clearly, step by step, leading readers to one of two conclusions. Either Covid-19 plagued the globe because of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in late 2019, or an absolutely remarkable series of coincidences, against overwhelming odds, led to a virus that has never been found in nature infecting a human being just down the road where the WIV was doing gain-of-function research on the virus in nature that is most similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.
The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.
The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Once again, this report is not claiming that Covid-19 — or more specifically, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is a biological weapon. The contention is that the research going on inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology was part of a Chinese effort to develop biological weapons — a subtle but meaningful distinction. From the first weeks of the pandemic, a lot of people who have wanted to pour cold water on the lab-leak theory have attempted to blur the lines between “escaped from a lab” and “was deliberately released from a lab.”