Sen. Tom Cotton and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were smeared as crackpot conspiracy theorists for challenging the dominant narrative that the novel coronavirus had purely zoonotic origins. But now, World Health Organization Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has made the stunning concession that, indeed, the question of whether the novel coronavirus actually emerged as a product of a risky gain-of-function experiment still needs investigation.
For the duration of the pandemic, Ghebreyesus has remained Xi Jinping’s most loyal bootlicker in the global health establishment. Ghebreyesus, touted as the Chinese Communist Party’s candidate of choice to lead the WHO, praised Xi for his “transparency” in handling the pandemic a month after Beijing lied about the virus’s human-to-human transmission and allowed 7 million people to fly internationally out of Wuhan. So it came as little surprise that the WHO would allow their “investigation” into the coronavirus’s origins consist of 17 Chinese experts and WHO officials approved by the Chinese Community Party.
The only American was Peter Daszak, a scientist who funneled U.S. government grants from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense to Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology virologist famous for studying — you guessed it — bat-borne coronaviruses.
The conflicts of interest in the WHO’s sham of an investigation were clear from the start. Every person on that team had a serious stake in absolving the Chinese government of the coronavirus’s release and creation. American diplomats visiting the WIV warned the State Department back in 2018 that the researchers were conducting dangerous experiments on bat coronaviruses.
If Chinese researchers did accidentally produce the novel coronavirus during a risky gain-of-function experiment, a well-known type of experiment to biohack existing coronaviruses into more transmissible variants, China would owe the world a settlement that would make the Treaty of Versailles look like a parking ticket. It would add insult to injury if they did so using American funding.
It’s a very welcome surprise that Ghebreyesus has finally conceded that the WHO “assessment” was not “extensive enough” and that he will deploy further experts specifically to investigate the lab leak hypothesis. But the evidence that a lab accident was more likely the virus’s origin than a zoonotic mutation was obvious and available a year ago.
Xi’s regime has had a year to destroy evidence, and the global health industry has remained loyal to its preferred narrative. It’s likely that we will never find the smoking gun proving the coronavirus came from that lab. But it’s worth understanding the circumstantial evidence in its entirety.
RaTG13, the closest known relative of the novel coronavirus, was found by none other than Shi Zhengli when miners over 1,000 miles away from Wuhan developed fatal pneumonia-like illnesses after cleaning bat feces out of copper mines. Zhengli and her team isolated nearly 300 novel coronaviruses in that Yunnan mine shaft, including RaTG13, which has a 96.1% nucleotide similarity to SARS-Cov-2. She brought them back to the WIV, China’s only BSL-4 laboratory.
We know that SARS-Cov-2’s closest cousin originated across the country from Wuhan, and, yet, the first known instance of the illness it caused just happened to be right next to this top-level biosafety lab, which we were also warned was conducting dangerous experiments to make coronaviruses more transmissible.
So what seems more likely? That RaTG13 was eventually biohacked into SARS-Cov-2 and left the WIV as a result of a lab accident? Or that, as the WHO report believes is most likely, that the virus mutated across multiple species over the course of more than 1,000 miles to wind up in the Huanan Seafood Market without spurring even a single human case of COVID-19 along the way?
Couple the circumstantial evidence in support of the lab leak hypothesis and the total lack of material evidence with the actions and incentives of the Chinese government. The Chinese experts refused to hand over raw data to the WHO, and the only American the WHO allowed after rejecting President Donald Trump’s proposed experts has the greatest stake in the Western world in having us all believe this global pandemic was a freak accident out in the wild, not one created by his own funneling of cash from the U.S. government.
Ghebreyesus’s about-face may be too little, but the Biden administration may keep it from being too late. Plenty of people on the Left may have drunk the Kool-Aid and branded anyone entertaining the lab leak hypothesis a racist, but the president and Secretary of State Antony Blinken haven’t taken the bait just yet. The Biden administration must take advantage of Ghebreyesus’s concession and pressure the rest of the West to make China let us discover this virus’s origins once and for all.
