Knowledge that the virus was deliberately produced in a lab would bring science into disrepute; revealing that it was done in China would set up a confrontation with China

Over nearly forty years of writing columns, I have learned that there are few things readers like more than when a columnist eats humble pie and admits that he was wrong. Yet this week, I’m going to do the opposite and take a bow for having been right.

The impulse to do so came to me while reading a March 21 piece by Andrew Sullivan, “Why Did This Man Mislead Us? The disturbing tale of how the scientific establishment took aim at the lab leak theory.” Just after Purim of 2021, I felt confident enough that Covid-19 had its source in a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to write, “The likeliest scenario for the emergence of SARS2 [Covid-19] is that it is the result of genetic engineering at the WIV, and that research was, at least in part by the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and carried out under minimal safety precautions.”

Needless to say, I did not reach that conclusion based on my own scientific expertise, of which I have none, but on the basis of excellent articles by Toronto neuroscientist Dr. Norman Doidge (“A Plague on Both Our Houses,” Tablet, Feb. 18, 2021) and former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade (“Origin of COVID — Following the Clues,” Medium, May 5, 2021).

Yet as late as October 2023, one could still read in the New York Times sentences such as: “No public evidence indicates that the Institute was storing any pathogen that could have become the coronavirus. Still, President Donald J. Trump and the Republicans of Capital Hill amplified the concerns.”

Those who dismissed the lab leak theory as a “fringe theory” (Washington Post) or a “conspiracy theory” (New York Times) did so largely on the basis of an article published March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” in which the four authors wrote, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Yet we now know all four authors of the Nature Medicine article believed just the opposite of that statement, based on their contemporaneous emails. Dr. Robert Garry stated, “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario [for the evolution of the bat virus to being able to infect humans]. In the lab, that would be easy.”

“The only thing here that strikes me as unusual,” wrote Dr. Andrew Rambaut, “is the furin cleavage site,” something “much more likely to be produced by a lab than by natural transmission.” (The furin cleavage site is on the virus’ spike protein, which is related to the virus’s infectivity.)

Dr. Edward Holmes opined that he was “60-40 lab.”

Dr. Kristian Andersen told Fauci on January 31, 2020, that he and his fellow authors all agreed that the genome of the SARS2 virus was inconsistent with natural development and “looks engineered.” Two days later he again emailed Fauci, “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely... the furin cleavage site is very hard to explain [without it] — it’s not some fringe theory.” And two days later, “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so likely to have happened because they were already doing this time of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Even before the Nature Medicine article was published, a letter appeared on February 19, 2020, in the respected medical journal Lancet, signed by 27 scientists who “strongly condemn[ed] conspiracy theories suggesting COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The principle author and organizer of the letter was Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, who had received research grants from NIAID to research the creation of spike proteins for bat viruses with affinities for human cells. Much of that research had been subcontracted to Dr. Shi Zhengli, the “bat lady” in charge of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In a poorly timed interview given on December 19, 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak was generally known, Daszak described in glowing terms how researchers at WIV “had succeeded in reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice,” untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and incapable of being vaccinated against.

The Lancet letter described the Chinese as having shown “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data.” Daszak surely knew that was not true, and the other signatories should have known. Not for a year after the Lancet letter was published did China permit a delegation of the World Health Organization to investigate. Dr. Ai Fen, head of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital, wrote about his examination of the initial SARS2 patients. First, the article disappeared; then Dr. Fen disappeared. Chinese authorities, according to Nicholas Wade, suppressed all records at WIV and closed down its viral databases.

Blood samples of the three WIV lab workers admitted to the hospital with Covid-like symptoms were never provided. The Chinese denied that Huang Yanling, a student at WIV, and believed to be patient zero, had ever been a student there, until her name appeared on an old WIV website.

WHAT CAUSED so many eminent scientists to participate in fraud as to the origins of COVID-19? Some of the answers are clear enough. The four authors of the Nature Medicine piece knew that Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, controlled tens of millions of dollars in research grants. (Collins is a Nobel laureate.)

They also knew that both men were ardent supporters of gain-of-function research (GoF), which Norman Doidge argues would be better named “virus deadliness enhancement.” The supposed purpose of developing more lethal viruses in labs is to enable the development of vaccines should any virus ever come into being and escape.

In Covid’s Wake, Princeton professors Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee reveal that at a 2015 joint meeting of the Royal Society and the National Academies of Science on GoF research, the work on SARS-related coronaviruses viruses being jointly carried out by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and University of North Carolina was considered the “most likely of all projects in the world to trigger a pandemic.” Yet somehow the research grants continued, even after the Department of Health and Human Services placed a moratorium on GoF funding in 2014, perhaps via a waiver from Fauci. (Recall that President Biden’s preemptive pardon of Dr. Fauci, issued on his last day in office, went all the way back to 2014).

Fauci had always defended GoF, despite numerous previous cases of lab leakage, on the grounds that “the engineered viruses... are maintained in high-security laboratories.” But the WIV did not come close to meeting that standard. And Dr. Fauci knew that. Dr. Shi’s grant requests specified that the experiments would be carried out on BSL2 of BSL3 safety conditions. And a State Department team on an inspection visit in 2018 found a lack of trained technicians in the lab, and that workers in the lab were working under BSL2 standards — the rough equivalent of a dentist’s office, not BSL4 standards for working with the most dangerous pathogens.

When Fauci referred journalists to the Nature Medicine paper, he did so without informing them that he had been intimately involved in its production, along with Collins. The two had led a conference call with the four authors a month prior to publication.

His motivation in continuing to push the theory that the virus had somehow jumped from animals slaughtered and sold in the Wuhan wet markets is simple enough. No one would want to be even partially blamed for the deaths of seven million people worldwide, especially one dubbed by much of the mainstream press as “St. Anthony.”

Kristian Andersen, in an email to Fauci, revealed another motivation as well: Knowledge that the virus was deliberately produced in a lab would bring science into disrepute; revealing that it was done in China would set up a confrontation with China.

That was something not only scientists but also politicians wished to avoid at all costs. The German spy agency, the BND, informed Chancellor Angela Merkel, as early as March 2020, that “it is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” M16 reported the same to Prime Minister Boris Johnson the same month. Yet both national leaders kept mum for fear of riling relations with China.

Perhaps they also did not want to be labeled racists. In May 2021, the New York Times’ Covid reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, tweeted, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.”

THE VENALITY of the scientists involved reminds us of the profundity of Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, as he sought to combat the widespread adulation of science and scientists as holding the answers to all questions of life. He encounted this view among the young men whom he tutored in London prior to opening Gateshead Kollel. Rav Dessler mocked the idea that the ultimate questions of existence and of man’s purpose could be solved by the application of intellect alone.

Let us assume that the person possesses a keen intellect, is well educated, and well-informed. However, so far as character is concerned, he is pretty average. He has never worked on himself in any consistent manner to change his basic nature or correct his character flaws.... If he is tempted by base desires, we can by no means be sure that he will not succumb, especially if no one is every likely to find out.

[Now let us say that] we are talking of a very comprehensive problem, the solution of which will affect the whole of his lifestyle.... On the solution will depend whether he will be obliged for rest of his life to struggle constantly with his baser desires in order to meet the demands of his Creator, or whether he will be able to live without a higher responsibility, with no restraints on his desires apart from those he deigns to place on them.

Rav Dessler would then laugh derisively at the idea that such a person could reach a decision “merely by exercise of his intellectual powers.” So should we.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1060)