When Jim Haslam first contacted me about his new book COVID-19: Mystery Solved he pasted in some information about the book which contained the following sentence:
We will explore the origin of the virus and expose its creators. SARS-CoV-2 was designed to spread; contagion was a feature, not a bug until the animal vaccine jumped species at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Being a trained biologist, I immediately thought I had spotted an error in the phrase “until the animal vaccine jumped species” and emailed Jim accordingly. But it turned out not to be an error.
Jim Haslam presents a controversial hypothesis regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, challenging the widely accepted narratives of a natural spillover or a simple lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The author posits that the virus was an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, designed to spread among bats but accidentally infecting humans in Wuhan. The information came to him, initially, in a leaked memo after which he started digging.
This ‘self-spreading vaccine’ theory suggests that key figures in US biodefence research, including Dr Anthony Fauci, were involved in its development and subsequent cover-up. The document details the project and research grants that allegedly funded this research, asserting that the virus’s unique genetic features, particularly the furin cleavage site, point to its engineered nature and ability to transmit efficiently in specific American laboratory animals.
Attention turned to bats, given the historical outbreaks of bat coronaviruses such as SARS1 in 2023. The aim was to target the natural animal reservoirs in their native habitats with a vaccine designed to self-spread among them. Due to the difficulty of keeping Chinese bats in captivity, the work had to take place in China and at its leading centre for viral research in Wuhan.
The above explains, according to Haslam, what was going on in Wuhan and why. But how did the vaccine/virus jump humans? The story begins with Assistant Professor Danielle Anderson, an Australian working in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Haslam claims that some carelessness by her in the process of working with infected bats, possibly a needlestick injury, led to her becoming infected. She travelled between her dormitory and the laboratory in a dedicated bus along with other laboratory workers and that was how it spread.
Haslam presents a map of Wuhan showing that the initial cluster of cases was around the dormitory and it seems that Anderson was ill for a while and isolated herself there. Hypotheses such as the wet market being the origin of COVID-19, which we know to be wrong, are easily dismissed under Haslam’s scheme. These were simply part of a campaign of misdirection to take attention away from the Institute of Virology.
The book is not always an easy read for several reasons. Haslam – an engineer who has clearly mastered the intricacies of virology – has a very dense, detailed, stream-of-consciousness style of writing. The book is long, over 400 pages, with 30 chapters and copious appendices. Continuity between chapters is not always clear and the lack of sub-headings within chapters makes the logic of the argument hard to follow at times. To help the reader, the author presents a list of abbreviations – of which there are a great many – and a timeline. A dramatis personae would also have been helpful; people appear and disappear regularly as Haslam tries to explain the links between them.
Nevertheless, Haslam is an entertaining writer and there are some witty turns of phrase and clever chapter titles such as: ‘Why Did the Batman Fly into Wuhan?’; ‘When the Batshit Hit the Fan’; and ‘Of Bats and Men’. The chapters are illustrated with combined photo-sketch scenes portraying leading figures in the laboratory or at meetings.
One feature which I did not always find useful and, in some instances, impossible to fathom were the tables which often featured at the ends of chapters. These were not referred to, not labelled and had no legends to aid understanding. In the early chapters they were reasonably clear but became increasingly complex and obscure.
The book tries to convince by bombardment with detail. However, one detail that is missing is the provision of URLs to the information purportedly supporting the underlying hypothesis. Haslam says that all the information is on the World Wide Web and he has checked sources so that we don’t have to. As he says: “The information in this book was verified online, so you can confidently read it offline.” The “Abbreviated Bibliography” to which I turned expecting, easily, to be able to check some sources is presented as titles of articles only with no journal details. Naturally, they are not too hard to find by copying and pasting into Google. But hyperlinks or URLs would have been helpful.
The author lists the many scientists in the field whom he has approached for comment and verification – without luck. Until someone demonstrates otherwise, Haslam concludes: “I consider the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to be solved.” I remain uncertain but, nevertheless, intrigued.
Due to the complexity of the book, I used Google Notebook LM® to create a ‘Deep Dive’ commentary on the book. This is published on my Watcast channel and on Spotify. COVID-19: Mystery Solved: It leaked from a Wuhan lab but it’s not Chinese junk is available on Amazon.
Dr Roger Watson is Professor of Nursing at Saint Francis University, Hong Kong SAR, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
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Excellent article 👏
Create the vaccine then create a need for it, ka-ching!
“The author posits that the virus was an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, designed to spread among bats but accidentally infecting humans in Wuhan.”
Yes he does but the resultant ‘pandemic’ was still used as a money maker whichever way the virus was discovered to be useful, a lucky happenstance, i doubt it, Fauci was up to his neck in it!
Ron Unz extensively reviewed the book by Haslam back in January 2025.
The book is best used with Haslam’s Substack articles which gives links to all the references.
https://www.unz.com/runz/five-years-and-thirty-million-deaths/
The elephant in the room for both the lab leak and zoonotic spillover theories is viruses (or virus-like particles) have yet to be proven pathogenic. Thus, both theories are the two constituent parts of a (deliberately?) engineered false dichotomy.
The permitting of the argument between these two choices alone, plus the question of whether we had a pandemic at all (and what therefore caused the myriad harms – environmental toxins etc) is completely and conveniently avoided.
Add in the fact PCR testing is methodologically flawed, meaningless and fraudulent, any honest scientist can conclude there was no actual respiratory pandemic, only an illusion.
Spot on. I for one, do not believe in ‘viruses’ (dead RNA which magically fly, infect, kill etc). A bio weapon from a US-Chyna lab is a sensible possibility. As is the ‘there was nothing’, theory, the entire plandemic built on psyops and the sheeple’s ignorance.
Excellent comment. I agree. The release of small quantities of poisonous gas at critical times would be all that was needed to keep the ball rolling.
I read it a few days after it was released and found it highly plausible. Much of this stuff is well known from Emily Kopp’s work. The potential that Dani Anderson was patient 0 in the other Wuhan lab in autumn 2019 has been mooted before. Baric still refuses to release his notes.
There is another possibility though, the Yeadon/Fenton&Neil/Engler/Hudson line, variations of ‘there was no pandemic-causing novel pathogen’.
And look what happened to the authors – e.g. the article about Fenton here the other day. I have a lot of time for Fenton, and have bought his “Fighting Goliath” book on the topic.
Joseph Hickey, Denis Rancourt and Christian Linard have written a new paper concluding that “the paradigm that a spreading viral respiratory disease caused the excess mortality during Covid is false”.
The following text is taken from a summary of the paper provided here.
Excess mortality did not align with the expected dynamics of viral spread but instead correlated tightly with aggressive medical interventions.
Synchronized death spikes across Europe and North America, defying geographic logic, erupted immediately post-declaration [the World Health Organization’s March 11, 2020, pandemic declaration], with no significant excess deaths prior.
Cities like Rome, with heavy air traffic from Asia, saw minimal mortality, while New York’s Bronx, served by expanded hospital systems, suffered catastrophic losses. “88% of patients put on ventilators in New York died,” not from a virus but from protocols like mechanical ventilation and high-dose drug regimens.
Rancourt’s findings reframe the entire COVID-19 saga as a tale of institutional assault.
Lockdowns, fear campaigns, and experimental treatments, induced biological stress and funnelled vulnerable populations into deadly medical pipelines.
The geographic patchiness – high death rates in areas like Lombardy but not neighbouring Veneto – defies viral transmission models, which, as Rancourt notes, “failed spectacularly” in predicting uniform spread.
Instead, socioeconomic vulnerability, particularly in poor communities near large medical centres, became lethal only when paired with aggressive interventions. This paradox, where access to “care” turned perilous, challenges the assumption that more medicine equates to better outcomes. Rancourt’s rigorous data, showing “deaths shifted from homes to hospitals” in high-mortality zones, invites skepticism of centralized health responses.
The true pandemic was one of policy, not pathology.
Just thought I’d add this here in relation to the jabbing programme enforced during the scamdemic:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/advice-accepted-on-autumn-2025-covid-19-vaccination-programme
Page summary:
The government has accepted advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) for the autumn 2025 COVID-19 vaccination programme
Change made:
The final two paragraphs have been added.
Time updated:
12:01pm, 26 June 2025
One change is that front line workers in health and social care / care homes are no longer eligible for the ‘free’ jabs – unless they come within vulnerable / health compromised groups – ‘as COVID-19 vaccination likely now has only a very limited impact on reducing staff sickness absence’.
It would be interesting to see if the push for staff to be jabbed has actually increased staff sickness due to side effects from the jabs!
Are TPTB finally accepting that the jabs provide very little, if any, protection against infection and any subsequent onward transmission of infection?
Is this the first step prior to finally accepting the many and varied harms caused by the jabs and the intense pressure – using varied means – imposed by governments / advisory groups and health care services on people to be vaccinated with questionable substances – was wrong and should not have happened?
Is sanity seeping into the system at long last?
Hallelujah!
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccination-in-2025-and-spring-2026-jcvi-advice
updated 14 November 2024
Which viruses have furin cleavage sites
Hmm…
.
GPT-4o mini
Furin cleavage sites are specific sequences in viral proteins that can be recognized and cleaved by the furin enzyme, which is a type of proprotein convertase. This cleavage is often crucial for the activation of viral proteins, facilitating processes such as viral entry into host cells. Several viruses are known to possess furin cleavage sites, including:
These furin cleavage sites are significant in the context of viral pathogenesis and can influence the severity of infections caused by these viruses.