You knew it. I knew it. Anthony Fauci and company undoubtedly knew it too.

But the US public health establishment has been denying it for 3 years
because they were partially responsible.

The UK�s Sunday Times, basically a centrist equivalent of The New York Times
for Great Britain (The New York Times was actually named after the Times),
has a bombshell report that COVID-19 was indeed engineered by the Chinese
military using US funding. The US funding came through the EcoHealth
Alliance.

There is still much we don�t know about #COVID19 origins in China but
it�s already clear COVID-19 was the greatest crime of the 21st century
to date. Twenty million people are dead from a totally avoidable
pandemic. It�s time for an international tribunal.
https://t.co/lFFE5BROwd

� Jamie Metzl (@JamieMetzl) June 11, 2023

The trail of money went, as we already know, from the NIH through the
EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Chinese Military
became involved in the coronavirus research around 2017 when gain-of-function
research started bearing fruit.

The Times� report, which I strongly suspect is absolutely true although I
have to take the Times� word on the provenance of the evidence, is based upon
confidential documents leaked to them by investigators who were sent to Wuhan
to study the outbreak. It also comes directly from the United States State
Department�s investigators who were sent to China to investigate the origins
of the virus. There are extensive quotes from those State Department
investigators.

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 US had banned funding for gain-of-function research until the decision
was reversed by Dr. Fauci, and the EcoHealth Alliance was enthusiastic about
restarting their research into making viruses more lethal for research
purposes. The whole point of gain-of-function research is to take benign
viruses and make them dangerous and virulent, theoretically for research
purposes.

Apparently, the Chinese military felt the same way about gain-of-function
research as the EcoHealth Alliance. Very enthusiastic indeed.

The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including
previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and
email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by
freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic
started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators �
including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare �
who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the
Covid-19 outbreak.

Note that last sentence: some of this information comes directly from US
government sources. The rest were from documents that were obtained either
overtly or covertly from correspondence or scientific papers. Essentially
they put together pieces of a puzzle that all fit together, and those pieces
are confirmed by the State Department investigators.

As you probably know, the British press is loosely divided between the
�respectable� broadsheet newspapers and the more lively and partisan tabloid
press. The Times is of the former class, is very establishment in outlook,
and was very on board with COVID lockdown policies. It has endorsed both
Labour and Conservatives over the years and actually endorsed Barack Obama
for president. It is more establishment than ideological.

In other words, the newspaper doesn�t have an axe to grind here and is not
known for hyperbole to generate sales and clicks. This is the equivalent of
the New York Times reporting that they have reviewed secret documents proving
Joe Biden engaged in a bribery scandal�it would be an admission against
interest.

The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus
in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based
charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist.
America�s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus
manipulation techniques.

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.

None of this should be shocking, given what we already know. In fact, most
Americans already believe that the virus came from a lab leak, despite
desperate efforts on Anthony Fauci�s part to deny this nearly certain fact.
As you may recall, when virus experts warned Dr. Fauci that the virus looked
engineered, he hastily arranged a conference call that pressured them to
assert that the virus was natural.

They did and were rewarded with $9 million in research grants. Fauci and co.
assert the two events were unrelated.

Yeah, right.

In any case, the State Department researchers found a lot of evidence that
the Wuhan lab was involved, despite Chinese interference in the
investigation.

They found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were
taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 � a month
before the West became aware of the pandemic � and one of their
relatives died.

An investigator said: �We were rock-solid confident that this was
likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus
research in the laboratory. They�re trained biologists in their
thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don�t get very
sick with influenza.�

Separate analysis shows the centre of the initial outbreak of Covid-19,
which has killed more than seven million people, was close to the
institute�s laboratory, rather than at the city�s �wet� wildlife market
as had been thought.

Notice how many facts known to US investigators have been systematically
denied in public. It is almost as if this is a huge coverup from the top,
although that would be unthinkable. Everybody involved has had good
intentions all along. Right?

Right?

The EcoHealth Alliance was known to skirt the US ban on gain-of-function
research that was implemented by the Obama Administration. They worked
diligently in Wuhan to engineer SARS-like viruses that did not infect humans
into infectious variants, as well as manipulate a MERS virus found in camels
into an infectious variant for humans.

All this work was done in Biosafety labs rated at level 2, or the level used
in a dentist�s office.

By 2017, according to a paper published by Shi, her scientists had
sought to create eight mutant viruses from the Sars-like coronaviruses
found in the Shitou cave. Two of the mutant viruses were found to
infect human cells. Most of this work was carried out in the institute�s
biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) laboratories, which took only light
precautions that have been compared to those used in a dental surgery.

By contrast, the US guidelines require level 3 (BSL-3) precautions for
similar work, including self-closing doors, filtered air and scientists
equipped with full PPE while under medical supervision.

The US embassy found out about the experiments in Wuhan and sent
diplomats with scientific expertise to inspect the institute in January
2018, according to diplomatic cables leaked to The Washington Post.
They observed �a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians
and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment
laboratory�.