The truth about the lab leak is leaking out

Two new investigative pieces - one from the UK, one on Substack - offer more proof Sars-Cov-2 came from a Chinese lab. Will the elite US media take note, or will Katherine Wu et al keep telling tales?

Chinese military scientists worked secretly alongside civilian researchers to make coronaviruses more dangerous at the Wuhan laboratory suspected as the source of Sars-Cov-2.

And the civilian researcher helping lead that effort was along three scientists at the lab who became sick with a respiratory virus in late 2019, before anyone in the world had heard of Covid.

And a Chinese military vaccine expert at the lab died after the outbreak began in 2020, supposedly after falling from the lab’s roof.

These revelations came from two major new investigations published in the last 48 hours, one in the Times of London, the other in Michael Shellenberger’s “Public” Substack.

Together, they suggest that despite the best efforts of China, and its handmaidens in the American media - most notably the Atlantic’s Katherine J. Wu - the truth about the origins of Sars-Cov-2 is emerging.

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(NO ONE’S HANDMAIDEN, AND MOST OF ALL NOT CHINA’S)

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Of course, Wu had help in promoting the absurd theory that raccoon dogs - which have NEVER been found naturally infected with Sars-Cov-2 - are the source of the epidemic.

American intelligence services appear to have engaged in a three-year conspiracy of silence to hide what they know about the lab leak.

It is simply not credible that the Central Intelligence Agency - and even more importantly, the National Security Agency - have no idea what happened in the fall of 2019 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab that is the likely source of Sars-Cov-2.

Compare the incredible detail the United States has on Russia’s intentions and even troop-level movements in Ukraine with its supposed inability to make even vague disclosures about a medium-security quasi-civilian Chinese lab where Western researchers sometimes worked.

Presumably, the spy agencies have stayed quiet at the behest of Western leaders who have no appetite to inflame tensions with China over what was likely an accident. (If Sars-Cov-2 was a bioweapon, it was incredibly poorly designed, as it barely sickens healthy fighting-age men.)

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(That raccoon dog won’t hunt)

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But the truth - especially the truth about a pandemic that killed millions of people and disrupted worldwide travel and commerce for two years - will not stay hidden forever.

The Times of London article, which was published Saturday, is paywalled. But it begins:

Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began.

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…

Unfortunately, the article does not detail further who the investigators were or how they had access to the information. But the Times of London is almost 240 years old and widely considered among Britain’s best newspapers.

The article also contains this stunning detail:

[The Chinese army] had its own vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist at the academy… [working at the lab] at the time of the outbreak...

In May 2020, aged just 54, Zhou appears to have died, a fact mentioned only in passing in a Chinese-media report and in a scientific paper that placed the word “deceased” in brackets after his name. Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.

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Meanwhile, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported Tuesday on Shellenberger’s “Public” Substack that:

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.

(Full disclosure: Shellenberger provided me with the most recent batch of the Twitter Files, showing that Twitter’s top lawyers believed it would lose my lawsuit against it over the ban.)

Shellenberger’s full story is here:

First People Sickened By COVID-19 Were Chinese Scientists At Wuhan Institute Of Virology, Say US Government Sources

Shellenberger’s piece also does not disclose the precise sources of its information, referring only to “sources within the US government.” But in my experience, Shellenberger is a careful and accurate reporter.

Further, the piece promises more revelations soon:

Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.

In other words, Shellenberger promises official confirmation within days.

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Whether any of this will matter to the elite American media remains to be seen. After all, it was less than three months ago that Wu and others doubled down on their raccoon dog nonsense. And American reporters have shown a notable reluctance to cover all kinds of unpleasant stories of late (including my ban and social media censorship generally and the increasing European pushback on the mRNAs)

But as long as Substack, Twitter, and a handful of real reporters exist, the truth will be impossible to hide from anyone who cares enough to look.