ThePrint and its Editor Shekhar Gupta must be given credit for being among the earliest anywhere in the world to create a full-length video covering journalist Nicholas Wade’s lab-leak thesis on the origins of Covid. Let us look at the story now given the astonishing “non-testimony” of the famous, or infamous, Dr Anthony Fauci. After all, the former top US pandemic adviser refused to answer questions 111 times at a Senate hearing last week.
As early as February 2020, The Lancet, a British journal considered one of the finest medical journals in the world, published a letter signed by 27 “reputed” scientists asserting emphatically that “scientists overwhelmingly conclude” that Covid had a wildlife origin. The letter went on to deride and condemn “conspiracy theories” that suggested a non-natural origin. In other words, those who even whispered about a possible lab leak were nut cases.
Within a month of the first Lancet letter, in March 2020, Nature Medicine, another prestigious journal, published an article on Covid origins. Since this was a proper article, Nature Medicine could not hide behind the fig leaf available to The Lancet, which had published a letter. It was duty-bound to conduct due diligence and have the article scrutinised by independent reviewers if its editors were following the basic protocols of scientific journals. The article argued that the Covid virus was not a laboratory construct and that a lab-based scenario was not plausible.
The case was “closed”. The Lancet and Nature Medicine — one with a letter signed by “eminent” scientists and the other with an article that had gone through rigorous editorial scrutiny — had pretty much closed the debate on the origins of Covid. Remember, this was in March 2020. But inconvenient facts have a way of bubbling up. After all, some centuries earlier, Galileo had conceded to the Catholic Church that the sun went around the earth, and that case too had been “closed”.
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A crack in the ‘consensus’
Along comes Nicholas Wade in May 2021. Now this Mr Wade had been the science editor of the New York Times for many years and was highly respected in scientific and journalistic circles. One would think that when Wade came up with a long article on the mysteries surrounding Covid, reputed magazines like The Atlantic or The New Yorker would give him space almost automatically. No such luck, my friends.
We all know that the doors of social media outfits like Facebook and Twitter (now X) had been closed to anyone who dared even mildly question the official line. It appears that even famed magazines with hoary traditions were now under the Gestapo regime of the US National Institutes of Health, which stubbornly stuck to the position that the lab-leak theory was an evil conspiracy.
Wade finally published on an internet platform called Medium. This can be seen as an indictment of the mainstream media, and we can take some amount of schadenfreude in the increasing irrelevance of MSM outlets.
Wade did a thorough job, using identified as well as anonymous sources, to point out that Chinese databases themselves stated that the programme to conduct research on bats had been plagued by strange stories and mysterious happenings. Wade was very careful to ensure that he would not be accused of fomenting conspiracy theories. But at the end of it, he made a solid case that the Covid virus was probably, although not definitively, created by humans in a lab. The proponents of the so-called zoonotic theory were unable, despite herculean efforts, to find the animal that had acted as the intermediary host before the virus struck humans. Wade argued that the virus was, in all probability, the direct result of experiments carried out in an organised manner. The existence of a genetic element called a furin cleavage site strongly, again if not conclusively, suggested this.
Through all of 2021, both The Lancet and Nature Medicine maintained a tepid, wishy-washy stance and kept stubbornly restating the animal-origin theory, known in scientific terms as the zoonotic origin of the Covid virus. In retrospect, the harm that these journals have done to science journalism is simply unforgivable. For years now, we have been given lectures about how Indian and Chinese scientific research remains plagued by plagiarism and the theft of ideas. We were told that the so-called peer-reviewed Western journals were the gold standard. Well, well, well — clearly the emperor needs some clothes out here.
As the controversies kept growing and growing, I, for one, could never understand why the American scientific and health bureaucracy and its European vassals were so keen to defend China. After all, Western governments had characterised China as an adversary. Would not the fact that a Chinese lab had leaked a pathogen strengthen the West’s narrative about China being a dangerous, predatory state? This “soft on China” posturing by Dr Fauci and his friends remained a conundrum that was difficult to explain.
The US-China connection
But 2026 is not 2021. Over the years, as humanity passed through a historic tragedy and emerged battered, and as the Wades of the world continued to dig through the debris, a bizarre story began to emerge. It starts with a scientific expression from the arcane field of virology: “gain-of-function research”.
When Senator Rand Paul kept questioning Fauci at the Senate hearing on the origins of Covid and US-funded research in Wuhan, an enormous amount of time and energy was devoted to the semantic deconstruction of what really constitutes “gain of function”. Watching Fauci’s responses, it appeared that he was keen to obfuscate the discussion.
Unlike Fauci, who claimed that he represented science, I can only lay claim to a modest acquaintance with the English language. OK. “Gain of function” may be difficult to explain or even define. I would argue that scientists were “fiddling” with viruses. “Fiddling” is an old-fashioned word that even Dr Science Fauci cannot argue with or wish away.
An enduring puzzle remained. Why on earth were Fauci and his cabal not taking the easy way out by smearing China over the inadequate state of its lab security? After all, Chinese scientists were plagiarisers and thieves of intellectual property, according to the high popes of the West. They most certainly qualified as being sloppy in their laboratory operations, didn’t they? Was the American scientific establishment implicated in any way? As Hamlet puts it, “Ay, there’s the rub”.
It turns out that gain-of-function research on viruses (sorry, I meant fiddling with viruses) had important roots in the United States, including at the University of North Carolina and the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana. One of the gurus of this kind of research was Dr Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. Dr Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology worked closely with Dr Baric.
A tragedy of errors
The pattern slowly begins to emerge. There was a school of thought in the academic virology community that it was a smart idea to fiddle with viruses to make them more deadly and then use these “enhanced viruses” to develop vaccines for as-yet unknown pandemics.
This school of thought had its opponents, who sought to limit or even ban such research. But when the doors are shut, surely some windows can be opened. The work could be cleverly spread across North Carolina, Montana and Wuhan; the expression “gain of function” could be quietly dispensed with; and direct US government funding could be avoided by routing money through an NGO called EcoHealth Alliance. In other worlds, this might be called money laundering. But here it is just called support for a worthy NGO.
There are more sickening details that emerge. An unrelated department of the US government (like our Delhi Durbar, the DC durbar too has countless departments) actually issued a warning that the Wuhan laboratories were not up to the mark in their safety protocols. The warning was ignored. The Wuhan Institute of Virology suddenly shut down the website that provided extensive information on bats and viruses. The mandarins at EcoHealth Alliance argued that this action was understandable because mysterious malign actors might hack the database.
The Greek tragedy unfolded step by step:
- The US pioneered gain of function (sorry, fiddling) research on viruses.
- US institutions and government agencies actively collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in this research. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who chaired The Lancet’s Covid-19 Commission and then questioned the early consensus, even makes the argument that not just research findings, but even samples may have been transferred from North Carolina and Montana to Wuhan.
- Taxpayer funds that rightfully belonged to hapless Americans were even used to subsidise the Wuhan laboratory.
- Safety warnings were ignored.
- The strange behaviour of the Wuhan laboratory was glibly explained away.
- AND THEN, THE VIRUS (the fiddled virus?) STRUCK!!
- It was not a Chinese Kung-fu virus after all. It may well have been a joint US-China production, even as we concede that the zoonotic theory cannot be ruled out. Now one understands why the American bureaucracy was not smearing China, but defending it. To admit that there was even a remote possibility that the conscious actions of parts of their government had killed about a million Americans was unthinkable, and this line of thought had to be actively suppressed.
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No catharsis, only cover-up
Greek tragedies are supposed to end with the audience attaining a state of catharsis. This happens because all is revealed. But in this 21st-century story of ours, things are not revealed. There is an elaborate cover-up. The Lancet and Nature Medicine are co-opted. The mainstream media, and even social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, are given orders by the Gestapo to cancel anyone who suggests, even remotely, that the virus may have come from a lab.
Are the recent Rand Paul hearings likely to reveal all? This writer personally doubts it. There might be some moves against Fauci, but in the final analysis, it will simply not be possible to tell the world that institutions across two countries were fiddling with viruses and this was a conscious action. And for all we know, such actions may be continuing. Even The Lancet and Nature Medicine may simply scapegoat a few employees and move on.
There is a sequel to this tragedy. The whole saga of totalitarian lockdowns and super-profitable vaccines, masks and hand lotions could take up thousands of words. That will have to be reserved for another column. But I do want to congratulate our government for tightening the screws on foreign NGOs. EcoHealth Alliance had, in fact, funded some bat research in India. We must thank providence that this research did not produce some deadly outcome.
Jaithirth ‘Jerry’ Rao is a retired entrepreneur who lives in Lonavala. He has published three books: ‘Notes from an Indian Conservative’, ‘The Indian Conservative’, and ‘Economist Gandhi’. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)