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It has been more than four years since the World Health Organization was tipped off about a mysterious new disease that had emerged in Wuhan. This turned out to be the start of a deadly pandemic as the virus swept across the planet, causing the worst public health catastrophe in a century.
It is now indisputable that the Chinese dictatorship covered up the outbreak of Covid in Wuhan – with disastrous consequences. Regime officials covered up the initial outbreak, silenced whistleblowers and censored data that could have saved millions of lives.
But when Michael Gove told the UK Covid-19 inquiry last year that there was “a significant view that believes the virus itself is man-made”, he was crushed when the lead lawyer, Hugo Keith, told him: “We don't go there.'
So this bloated, costly study is keen to admonish British politicians, while ignoring the much bigger question of whether the pandemic was fueled by groundbreaking scientific research or whether there was 'natural' transmission from infected animals.
EcoHealth says the documents are incomplete and that the “allegations are false, based on misunderstandings of edits and comments on the document, and based on misleading out-of-context quotes and a lack of understanding of the process by which federal grants are awarded.”
It is believed that the Covid-19 pandemic was first detected at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan
Keith's knee-jerk response reflected the desperate attempts of Western political, scientific and media institutions to suppress such discussion while bowing to China's bullying rulers and funding ties to risky research outsourced to China's laboratories Covering up Wuhan.
No reliable evidence has emerged to support claims of zoonotic (animal-to-animal) transmission. But mounting evidence suggests it may not be a coincidence that Covid emerged in the city with China's maximum biosafety laboratory, Asia's largest repository of bat coronaviruses.
I have been reporting on these issues since early 2020 – and it has been deeply disturbing to witness systemic attempts to curtail debate as it erodes public trust in science, politics and the media.
The obstruction was led by the heads of key American and British funding bodies. Yet a study last month revealed 309 laboratory infections between 2000 and 2021 – along with 16 cases of pathogens escaping from a laboratory.
The P4 laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, central China's Hubei province on April 17, 2020
Alarming details about the work in Wuhan and China's cover-up have emerged, along with concerns about 'Wild West' security and details of secret plans to increase the contagiousness of coronaviruses.
Today, there is growing acceptance that a laboratory incident could have caused the pandemic.
While no one knows the answer to this scientific riddle for sure, one thing is clear. There has been a toxic conspiracy of silence in collaboration with China on the origins of Covid, which has betrayed the values of democracy and science.
This undermines all efforts to prepare for the next pandemic.