The Time Has Come for a Full Accounting of COVID-19 Origins

The case for a COVID-19 research-related origin is becoming exponentially stronger while arguments for other origin hypotheses have either been debunked or are clearly not supported by the available evidence.

1. Phylogenetic analysis shows that something significantly like the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have evolved in northern Vietnam or southern China — but for the presence of the unprecedented furin cleavage site (never before seen in any sarbecovirus) and but for the spillover happening in Wuhan, far away from where a natural evolution could have been imagined. (“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…” the virus spills over more than a thousand miles away from the natural habitat of the relevant horseshoe bats in the city with China’s first and largest level-4 virology lab which was doing aggressive research engineering SARS-like viruses using sub-standard safety protocols.) This has led many researchers to the logical inference that the viruses were most likely transported to Wuhan and then subjected to human-manipulated evolutionary pressures. See this.
2. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has highly unique features that led Bruttel, Washburne, and VanDongen to suggest a synthetic (aka bioengineered) origin (see this). Now we’ve learned through the full 2018 DEFUSE application (FOIAd by US Right to Know), that the WIV, EcoHealth, UNC, and others sought to engineer SARS viruses in Wuhan (and UNC) exactly the same ways Bruttel et al later identified as suspicious. See this. Even though DARPA wisely rejected this application, it appears likely the work was carried out in China regardless. The odds of this being a coincidence are pretty much… zero.
3. The DEFUSE applicants had also, we now know, intended to deceive DARPA by doing this work at WIV, where safety conditions were low and where all held viruses were not even characterized. See this. Some of these DARPA applicants, most notably Peter Daszak, were also behind the highly deceptive and now infamous February 2020 Lancet letter, stating without any evidentiary support that “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” As I told Vanity Fair in 2021 when the DEFUSE proposal was first leaked and it became clear that the self-appointed inquisitors labeling those of us raising common sense questions regarding a possible lab origin as conspiracy theorists, “If I applied for funding to paint Central Park purple and was denied, but then a year later we woke up to find Central Park painted purple, I’d be a prime suspect.” The second part of my quote was not included in Katherine Eban’s article: “If I hid the history of my grant application while leading a campaign to label anyone asking common-sense questions about how this may have happened as a conspiracy theorist, I’d be a fraud.”
4. The market origins (see this and this) and racoon dogs papers which, inappropriately, received so much attention and adulation in the media (see, for example, this), have now been almost entirely debunked, leaving little to no evidence supporting hypotheses other than a research-related origin. See this, this, this, and this.
5. Credible (and brave) Chinese scientists in the early days expressed their belief that the pandemic likely stemmed from a lab accident in Wuhan (see this and this), and George Gao, China’s former CDC director and a Yale-trained virologist, has been emphatic in his view that the pandemic did not start in Wuhan’s Huanan market but was amplified there (see this).
6. Evidence of China’s Herculean and ongoing efforts to suppress any meaningful investigation into the pandemic origins issue, at very least, raise further questions. See this and this. As in a mafia trial where prospective witnesses keep disappearing before they can be called, China’s behavior only adds to suspicions.

The available evidence does not yet reach the level of 100 percent certainty of a research-related origin in Wuhan, but any credible jury would almost certainly arrive at that conclusion.

Per Economist figures, 27 million people are dead as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was an entirely avoidable, political pandemic. But for China’s unique political pathologies, there very likely would have been no pandemic at all. Without full accountability for what went wrong, there will be no possible way to establish principles of transparency and accountability going forward.

We have to be fearless looking anywhere and everywhere there are answers – including in China, France, the United States, and elsewhere. Although China has by far the greatest culpability for the pandemic, there were lots of failures to go around. All must be probed, understood, and addressed.

The time has come for a full accounting of COVID-19 origins. It now appears likely we’ll be able to determine with a high level of confidence what caused the pandemic. For the sake of future generations, we must have the confidence and political will to do so.