Evidence is showing that the United States most likely paid for work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that ended up creating the deadly coronavirus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic, argues author Peter Van Buren.
“A series of cover-ups means we are unlikely to ever know the truth of why our loved ones died,” Van Buren writes for The American Conservative.
He notes that there are two origin stories for COVID-19; one pointing to it having emerged naturally but the other that it was created by the Chinese laboratory and was released.
Science writer Nicholas Wade, he added, “makes a strong case” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the United States was behind the virus’ financing.
EcoHealth Alliance in New York has “created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature” for the past 20 years, writes Van Buren.
“Scientists argue that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent ‘spillovers’ from animal hosts to humans,” he said. “Like something out of Jurassic Park, this is known as gain-of-function research, genetic manipulation to ‘improve’ nature.”
The work has enabled scientists to synthesize the nearly-extinct polio virus, introduce a smallpox gene into a virus, and more, he said.
And the Wuhan lab, writes Van Buren, teamed with the University of North Carolina to “enhance the ability of bat viruses to attack humans,” including creating a virus in November 2015 that was once dangerous “only to bats but now able to infect the cells of the human airway.”
Meanwhile, Wuhan’s key researcher, Shi Zhengli, called “the Bat Lady,” engineered coronaviruses, said Van Buren, with her research “funded by the Obama administration’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health.”
The NIH assigned the grants to EcoHealth, which then subcontracted the work to the Wuhan lab, meaning “the work which likely created COVID-19 was paid for by the United States.”
Shi, however, has denied being in contact with the virus or studying the specific virus that caused COVID-19 before she and her colleagues discovered the virus in late 2019 in samples from patients who suffered from a pneumonia of unknown origin.
Before that, “we had never been in contact with or studied this virus, nor did we know of its existence,” Shi wrote in a document for Science Magazine.
But Van Buren writes that the Wuhan lab pulled its virus database offline after a lecture from Shi in September 2019, and the Chinese government is still refusing to provide raw data or lab records.
He also noted that in 2018, State Department inspectors were alarmed by what they found when visiting the Wuhan lab, and warned that the facility’s work on “bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”
Van Buren notes that one of the strongest supporting documents concerning the theory of a natural origin was in the British medical journal Lancet, but “the letter had actually been written not by the scientists, but by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth.
He also pointed out that Dr. Anthony Fauci has denied that the NIH funds gain-of-function research.
“He appears to have committed perjury, as Fauci now admits ‘there’s no way of guaranteeing’ American taxpayer money routed to Wuhan didn’t fund gain-of-function research,” said Van Buren.
He also criticized the media for aiding the “cover-up” and noted its continued embrace of the natural origins theory and its slam of former President Donald Trump’s China travel ban.
“It is only now, months into the safety of the Biden administration, that the media is willing to take a peek inside Pandora’s Box,” he said.
“We do know Wuhan conducted gain-of-function research aimed at doing what COVID-19 does, making a virus originally not dangerous to humans into a super-infector designed to spread quickly while resisting then-existing cures and vaccines,” he said.
Story cited here.
