According to confidential files seen by the Sunday Times Insight team, Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens at the Wuhan Institute of Virology shortly before the pandemic broke out. Here’s how the report in today’s paper 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.
The U.S. 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 U.S. State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant U.S. inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science. Researchers who have attempted to find conclusive proof have been hampered by China’s lack of transparency.
However, our new investigation paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory.
The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the SARS virus in 2003, attracted U.S. government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.
The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.
This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to SARS.
Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of COVID-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.
They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a U.S. investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”
According to the U.S. investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.
They believe this led to the creation of the COVID-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the COVID-19 pandemic,” one of the investigators said.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Mail has a non-paywalled summary of the story here.
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“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.”
Well slapper my thigh! What an outrageous coinkydink?
I’d be more convinced it the major source were not U.S. State department investigators, whose motives might well be (a) to demonise China at a time when the US government is, well, demonising China with a view to conflict and (b) motivated to cover any of America’s own involvement in gain-of-function studies, whether at Wuhan or in the US, or in Ukraine, for that matter.
Sadly, we live in an age when very few state efforts to get to the truth of a matter are efforts to get to the truth of a matter.
Agreed. The US knew what was going on in Wuhan well after 2016. In 2018 project DEFUSE (the blueprint for SARS 2) proposed work to be carried out at UNC and Wuhan. That the Sars 2 furin cleavage site shares a 19nt segment with a Moderna patent, and that in 2019 Moderna was supplying novel corona virus vaccines to UNC for testing also massively implicates the US.
F the source! Imagine all the places a so called pandemic could begin, worldwide! I do believe in coincidences, but, this one is hard to swallow, a wet market at the side of the only Chinese bio weapons research laboratory? If it wasn’t them, it will be us! One day, and we’ll cover it up just the same, we already have!
(With all due respect Jon)
‘… as the only members of COVID-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.’
COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) is the designation given to the disease caused by Coronavirus 2 (CoV 2).
This is ignorant and sloppy reporting. It may seem pedantic to point it out, but it is precisely this sort of inaccuracy, conflation of terms, which causes misunderstanding, confusion and allows the Government and vested interests to get away with their lies.
For example: the Govt claimed that PCR test is a test for CoVid and if you test positive you have Covid and must isolate, etc. In fact PCR only detects fragments of or whole virus whether active or not.
It is NOT a diagnostic test which can make a differential diagnosis of disease. It does not therefore follow that a positive PCR test result indicates the individual has the disease.
Using CoVid and CoV 2 as if interchangeable, allowed the Govt to operate its very successful fear campaign about how widespread and infectious the virus was, by presenting positive PCR tests as ‘cases’ of disease (CoVid) which they were not, instead of detection of the virus (CoV 2) which they were. The test could not distinguish between fragment, whole virus, active or inactive virus, or material from a current or previous infection.
It also enabled them to spread the nonsense about ‘asymptomatic’ infectious people – because many people with positive PCR test did not in fact have CoVid, in order to enforce its mask and vaccination propaganda.
(There is nothing unique to distinguish the disease caused by Coronavirus 2 from the disease caused by the other Common Cold causing coronaviruses, influenza and other respiratory viruses. They all share the same symptom set.)
By not reporting correctly, this is truly ‘misinformation’, not deliberate but nevertheless not relaying a clear, factual account so that people are properly informed and therefore cannot so easily be duped.
Spot on. There is no shortage of linguistic manipulation, based on the opinion of how the punters will interpret what is said, rather than scientific facts. Even to the extent of classifying the novel virus as SARS-Cov-2. After all, in the real world, it appears that it’s not all that “SARS” for most of us. For the benefit of doubt, the acronym is meant to stand for “Severe Acute Respiratory Disease”. They also ignore that there are established Coronaviruses, which have less easy to advertise names, like HKU-1, OCE43, 229E etc. These are thought to cause many “common colds”.
If they were more honest about it, they could have used a more obscure name, say WN-19 – but where would they be politically? There were plenty of opportunists ready to carry out the dodgy tests as you describe as well.
Whatever the origin of the bug it does not excuse the outrageous response of nominally democratic countries. Not even if our leaders had been briefed that it was lab-designed to be as deadly as Ebola and infectious as the common cold.
It wasn’t that deadly – but we weren’t allowed to discuss that.
Lockdowns didn’t work – but we weren’t allowed to discuss that.
The vaccines didn’t do what was claimed – but we weren’t allowed to discuss that.
See the pattern that developed?
These dahys no one expects any politician or civil servant to know about anything other than spin, lobbying and PR. None of them has sufficient experience, knowledge, skill or training to challenge any old rubbish presented to them.
This serves to explain the policy failures which are costing us so much: Covid, Net Zero, Remain, fracking.
Gosh, what a scoop for the Sunday Times.
(Zerohedge reported most of these 2 years ago).
It’s difficult to believe any reporting about the virus is other than propaganda when there are so many compelling information sources claiming that the virus has never been isolated. See, for example, all of Sam Bailey’s work on the subject.