I say “bombshell report”, but who are we kidding here: You knew it already.
It suits almost everybody in power across the world to ignore entirely the startling revelations that emerged in this weekend’s Sunday Times. Before we get into it, a flavour of their reporting, which you should read in its entirety:
Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began.
Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.
The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.
The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.
This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.
Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.
They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”
According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.
All reporting should, of course, be treated with appropriate scepticism. But in this case, the reporting fits entirely with observable reality, and should, I think, be treated as the most obvious and overwhelmingly likely source of the pandemic that upended our lives for the guts of two years, and killed many thousands of people worldwide.
First, it has been known for some time that gain of function research was conducted in the Wuhan lab. Nobody denies that.
Second, China has long had a well known, though officially denied, biological weapons programme. You can read more about that in detail here.
Third, almost everything about the Chinese reaction to the initial leak screams of a country trying to engage in a cover-up: We need not recount the extent to which the virus was first denied, then played down, and then subject to an extraordinary cock and bull tale about somebody eating an endangered animal at a food fair.
Fourth, the lack of official and public and global investigations into the source of covid: Almost all of the investigations have been openly rebuffed and rejected by China, with almost no international pushback. That strongly suggests that the US is not the only country to have come to the conclusion that China probably did it, albeit accidentally, and that the diplomatic consequences of pointing the finger at the famously hubristic CCP are too high to risk it.
When nobody really wants to talk about the source of covid, that does not suggest intellectual curiosity. It suggests an unwillingness to face the consequences of talking.
Were it to be officially acknowledged or alleged by western governments that the rest of the world suffered the consequences of illegal Chinese research into biological weapons, the can of worms that might be opened would be too much to bear: There would be natural and justified calls for Chinese reparations, and possibly sanctions. The Chinese would deny it and threaten retaliation. The refusal to hold them to account might empower the wrong kind of people, electorally.
Western Governments, it seems, consider the cure in this case to be worse than the disease. Much better to pootle along with a sort of shrug of the shoulders and say you are keeping an open mind, in the hope that eventually, interest in the topic is going to go away.
In that respect, the strategy is probably already working: In about 2021, there would have been immense public interest in a “whodunnit?” about Covid. In 2023? You’d probably struggle to find that many average people who care. It’s over, and sure we did great, and that’s the main thing.
We should also admit that in practical terms, holding a country of over a billion people to account is no easy task anyway. The west can’t hold them to account on human rights or climate change as it is, so they’re certainly not going to be able to push them into admitting responsibility for covid.
What we should do, though, is remember the efforts to silence us, not by China, but by our own Governments.
We should remember the efforts to shut up anyone who said “China virus”, or the efforts to call out as a conspiracy theorist anyone who drew the obvious inference about a dangerous virus coming from a Chinese laboratory. We should remember how the media co-operated with the state to suppress awkward questions.
We didn’t just get a Chinese virus. We also got Chinese censorship. Kudos to the Sunday Times for finally breaking the real story.
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