Was Donald Trump right all along about covid-19?
Did the world’s worst pandemic for 100 years emanate from a laboratory in Wuhan, China?
If so, where does all this leave Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, and the face of the nation’s response to Covid, who vehemently dismissed the engineered theory but has close and potentially conflicting ties to China’s top scientists and the very lab under suspicion?
These are some of the very uncomfortable questions now gathering ferocious momentum following President Biden’s decision to order a new 90-day investigation by US intelligence agencies to ‘redouble their efforts’ in determining how the coronavirus started.
And there’s a fourth even bigger question if the answers to the first two are ‘yes’ and ‘yes’, which is this: if China knew the virus erupted from one of its labs, either accidentally or nefariously, and then covered it up to the world, how should it be punished?
These are all vitally important questions because this is potentially shaping up to be the biggest scandal and mass manslaughter case in modern history.
At the centre of it is The Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of China’s top virus research labs, which built a huge amount of genetic information about coronaviruses after the 2003 outbreak of SARS.
The official theory of how COVID-19 started, leaping from a bat to a human in a live animal wet market in Wuhan, always seemed a bizarre and convenient – for China – coincidence given that just a few kilometres away from the market lies the huge WIV laboratory run by scientists performing constant tests on coronaviruses.
China’s credibility in this crisis was already severely damaged from the start by its refusal to be transparent about the rapid spread of the virus, lies about its soaring infection numbers while setting up temporary hospitals, denials it could be transmitted from human-to-human even when it was happening, and decision to allow international travel to continue when it knew that was likely to export a global outbreak.
Since then, Chinese officials have continued to spread disinformation in a desperate effort to avoid blame, even suggesting that COVID-19 could have started in myriad other countries from Italy and India to the US or arrived in China via frozen food.
In fact, they’ve said anything and everything to deflect attention from the WIV lab-leak theory which would, if proven, make China directly culpable for the ruinous pandemic.
Those who have screamed loudest about the theory, led by Donald Trump who dubbed COVID-19 the ‘China virus’, have been berated and belittled as conspiracy theorists and nutjobs.
That view was encouraged by experts like Dr Fauci who repeatedly publicly dismissed the theory, insisting that coronavirus mutations which led to COVID-19 are ‘totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human rather than a lab leak.’
Now, thanks to a massive news dump of 3,200 pages of Fauci’s emails, following a FOIA request by BuzzFeed, we can see how vital his opinion was to those with a vested interest in the WIV lab and what a tangled web starts to emerge about exactly what America’s own involvement might have been in the lab’s work.
What is clear from the emails is that from near the start of the pandemic, Fauci was being sent repeated warnings about the lab-leak theory.
On April 16, 2020 Francis Collins, the director of the National Institute of Health, emailed him a link to a Fox News report news supporting the theory under the subject line ‘conspiracy gains momentum.’
Fauci’s response to Collins is entirely blacked out, which in itself is suspicious.
What did he say in response?
Why can’t we know it?