Published by The i paper (27th January, 2025)
“Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth,” said the philosopher Confucius, whose teachings shaped Chinese society for more than 2,000 years and have enjoyed a revival under Xi Jinping’s rule. Certainly the sage’s wise words ring startlingly true if we consider the search to find the origins of Covid-19, that strange new disease that exploded with such ferocity from Wuhan, a city in central China, to spread death and despair around the world. For it is now clear there was a campaign of obfuscation, pushed by some top Western scientists – and that their shameful efforts have failed.
Five years ago, this group of Western scientists, supporting the line of the communist dictatorship in Beijing, used their prominence to push the idea that it was conspiracy theory to suggest Sars-CoV-2 – the coronavirus strain that causes Covid – could have come from a laboratory in Wuhan. They capitalised on the divisions of Donald Trump’s first presidency to stamp on speculation that risky experiments with bat viruses in Wuhan might have been to blame for the catastrophe – despite the fact that the World Health Organisation was warning about the dangers of diseases created by scientists and that there have been at least 16 known escapes of pathogens this century.
Their stance has since been undermined by determined investigators, leaked emails, Freedom of Information bids and US congressional inquiries. These revealed funding ties between Washington and Wuhan. They found a proposal to engineer a virus strikingly similar to Sars-CoV-2 shortly before the pandemic. And they showed that even some vocal public proponents of natural transmission from animals had private concerns over biosafety in Wuhan, risky experiments and possibilities of lab leakage. Yet they drafted papers for journals dismissing its plausibility, some even praising the Beijing dictatorship that covered up the outbreak, while attacking those daring to challenge the consensus.
Now Trump is back in the White House. The key US cash conduit for Wuhan has been blocked from federal funding. And the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has issued an assessment concluding Covid is “more likely” to have leaked from a Chinese laboratory than to have had natural zoonotic origin, joining the FBI and Department of Energy, which runs advanced biology labs, in adopting this view.
Other US intelligence agencies disagree. None profess certainty. The CIA cautioned that it still had “low confidence” in such a definitive conclusion at this stage. Inevitably, the zoonosis diehards will say the release of this report was politically motivated following the appointment of a director who supports the leak theory. Yet this report was compiled and published internally under the previous Joe Biden administration, while last month The Wall Street Journal reported on alleged suppression of another intelligence agency review that decided the virus was most likely lab-made.
The CIA’s shift came the day after one of Europe’s most influential scientists said his view had “evolved” with fresh data as he called for China to prove if the disease really came from animals. “The more time passes, the more sceptical I become,” confessed Christian Drosten. His words are highly significant since he advised both Germany and the European Union on the pandemic – and also participated in the now-notorious teleconference call of 1 February, 2020 that sparked attempts to discredit the lab leak idea.
This was led by Sir Jeremy Farrar, then head of the Wellcome Trust, with his friend Anthony Fauci, the former US presidential adviser who spent almost four decades running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, the world’s biggest biomedical research agency.
The German virologist pointed in an interview to the stunning discovery that Wuhan scientists had sought US cash to create viruses with the defining feature of Sars-CoV-2: a furin cleavage site that helps it bind effectively to cells in human tissues yet is not found on hundreds of similar coronaviruses. One US biosafety expert described this 2018 funding submission and its drafts to me as the blueprint for engineering the Covid virus. “The public is rightly asking if Chinese scientists might have worked on it anyway,” Drosten told Die Tageszeitung. “I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling.”
The circumstantial evidence points to a lab leak. Covid erupted in a city hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with most similar coronaviruses. Wuhan is home to a lab that had known safety concerns, contains the world’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses and was conducting high-risk “gain of function” research to boost infectivity of mutant viruses using humanised mice.
An alternative theory that the virus might be traced to a market selling wild animals was dismissed by Chinese experts and is countered by early cases, although it keeps bouncing back with claims about pangolins or raccoon dogs.
Sadly, China has blocked all proper efforts to probe the virus origins. And that laboratory took its key database of samples and unpublished sequences offline in September 2019 – when some believe the disease emerged.
I am no fan of Trump – and there remains no conclusive proof over Covid origins – but this is one area that might be helped by the returning President’s aggressive approach. It is disgraceful, however, that his predecessor sought to protect Fauci with a pre-emptive pardon. Note how this was backdated to 2014 – start date both for a US ban on gain of function research and for a key grant to Wuhan that some experts fear is linked to the research that sparked a pandemic. This showed again the scale of this scandal that so demeans science, politics and journalism.
It is good, however, to see that the real Covid conspiracy is being steadily crushed. As Confucius also said: “Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it.”