FILE_5872

The explosive truth about the origin
of Covid-19 may finally be about to

emerge
Trump’s new lieutenants, Jay Bhattacharya and John
Ratcliffe, are convinced that a lab leak was probably
the source
Matt Ridley
06 December 2024 10:30am GMT
It is now five years since people in Wuhan started dying from a mysterious
new form of pneumonia that spread like wildfire, overwhelming every
blockade put in its way. But the election of Donald Trump may be about to
transform our understanding of how the Covid pandemic began. An insider
tells me explosive documents may come to light – so long as they do not
expose intelligence assets in China. The foxes are in the henhouse.
Trump cannot change the intransigent refusal of the Chinese authorities to

investigate what went on in the world’s leading laboratory for studying SARS-
like viruses in bats, which happened to be in Wuhan. But his lieutenants,
especially the health economist Jay Bhattacharya – nominated to head the
National Institutes of Health – and John Ratcliffe – nominated to lead the CIA
– are convinced that a lab leak was probably the source of the outbreak, and
are determined to unblock the obfuscation inside the American bureaucracies,
where some of the funding and expertise for the key experiments originated.
A new report from a subcommittee of the House of Representatives complains

how government officials “obstructed” its work in multiple ways, and lays out
:
in gobsmacking detail just how much senior officials allegedly have schemed
to prevent information emerging: frustrating freedom of information requests,
redacting documents and misleading journalists all in an attempt to “help put
down this very destructive conspiracy [theory]” that Covid started with a lab
leak – in the embarrassing words of one of Bhattacharya’s predecessors,
Francis Collins.
Incredibly, for instance, one of Collins’s senior bureaucrats, David Morens, is

quoted in the report as seemingly describing how not to write emails that
might be made public: “Hopefully no problems with the emails that came to
me at my NIH address. I deleted them quickly and hopefully didn’t reply to
any.”
Senator Rand Paul will now chair a crucial Senate committee, giving him
subpoena power. It was Paul who was told by Dr Anthony Fauci during a
previous hearing “you do not know what you are talking about!” on the topic
of whether the US government had funded gain-of-function research in China.
The new House subcommittee report concludes, however, that it was Fauci
who did not know what he was talking about: “Dr Fauci’s testimony to
Senator Paul misled the public regarding the funding of gain-of-function
research at the WIV.”
The committee lays out how Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance,
the conduit by which US taxpayer’s money flowed to Wuhan, allegedly misled
the committee, helped to shift gain-of-function experiments to China, and set
out to shut down speculation that those experiments led to the pandemic. As a
funder and collaborator of the Wuhan lab, Daszak was under an obligation to
demand access to lab notebooks and viral samples from Shi Zhengli, the head
of the lab in question, but, according to the committee’s report, failed to do so.
Shi Zhengli spoke this week, by Zoom, to a conference in Japan on “planning

:
for the next pandemic”. Shockingly, the organisers of the Japan meeting
excluded Hideki Kakeya, a genomic expert who had asked searching questions
at a previous meeting, on the ground that he was “disruptive”.
I discovered that this was untrue: the organiser of the previous meeting
Nishimura Hidekazu told me he behaved in a “gentle and gentlemanly manner
there and asked questions normally”, while one of the organisers of the current
meeting Maoyen Chi admitted to me that Kakeya’s “anti-China policy” played
a part in his exclusion, as did the fact that “he is notorious in the field of
science related to Covid, such as its origin”.
In other words, parts of the scientific establishment are still trying to censor
some scientists and protect others who have been uncooperative in helping us
understand how a virus killed more than 20 million people. That is a strategy
that is bound to backfire.
The viral vector engineering expert Alina Chan of MIT and Harvard (my co-
author) recently wrote “Scientists shouldn’t be censoring themselves. We’re
obliged to put all the data out there. We shouldn’t be deciding that it’s better if
the public doesn’t know about this or that. If we start doing that, we lose
credibility, and eventually we lose the public’s trust.”
For many observers, the entire episode has revealed a dark side to science,
where groupthink and propaganda trump reason and evidence. As one expert
on viral outbreaks who had competed with Daszak before the pandemic, Alex
Washburne, put it last week: “The rampant promulgation of such motivated
reasoning in science is undermining everything, from trust in science to even
the quality of our scientific enterprise.”
The virologist Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute in Paris takes a

similar view: “The public is thirsty for science and can’t get enough of it. They
:
just want to know a little more of what we know. That’s not a big ask.
Whenever evoking pandemic preparedness or anything else scientific, don’t
censor the right to free speech and thought. Ever.”
Matt Ridley is the co-author with Alina Chan of ‘Viral: The Search for the
Origin of Covid-19’
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The explosive truth about the origin

of Covid-19 may finally be about to

Trump cannot change the intransigent refusal of the Chinese authorities to

A new report from a subcommittee of the House of Representatives complains

Incredibly, for instance, one of Collins’s senior bureaucrats, David Morens, is

Shi Zhengli spoke this week, by Zoom, to a conference in Japan on “planning

The virologist Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute in Paris takes a

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