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Was SARS-CoV-2 Virus Created As a Bioweapon?

 

July 2023 New Release on COVID-19 Source

Several theories about how the virus may have emerged have now been thrown out. What remains falls under three possible scenarios:

• The virus evolved naturally before spilling over into humans from an infected animal.
• The virus evolved naturally, but a Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) lab researcher became infected from a sample and accidentally "leaked" it into the community.
• Scientists at the WIV were manipulating bat virus samples and accidentally or intentionally released the pathogen.

A survey taken in 2020 found that one in four Americans and Britons think the idea that the virus was engineered in a Wuhan laboratory is a "reliable" claim, despite abundant scientific evidence to the contrary. [highlight mine] An even higher portion of respondents in Ireland and Spain — 26% and 33%, respectively — put stock in that theory, as do nearly 40% of survey participants in Mexico. However, recent polls by YouGov¹ have found two-thirds of Americans now believe in a lab leak source. Articles written about these survey results before 2023 categorize those who believe in a lab leak theory as susceptible to false information and/or followers of social media. In other words, there was only one acceptable belief and all who didn't follow the consensus were derogatorily labeled.

It has now been over three years since the pandemic began and yet there still is no definitive answer as to the source of the deadly virus that killed over seven million people worldwide.  But at least there is some broadening of minds in the scientific community as some have dared to voice opinions that the controlling elite wants silenced. We still have a right to have open minds and look at all possibilities, but also to side more with what our intuition may tell us. The families of the deceased deserve to know the truth and all who suffered from its consequences worldwide, which we all have at various levels. Only through transparency can we learn what caused this pandemic and how to prevent the next one from happening again. Terrorists and countries like N. Korea have now seen how a lethal virus shut down the West and it is important to uncover the truth to prevent rogue nations who are determined to destroy the West from doing so.

The following information on the three theories has been very difficult to condense. The vastness of information since the pandemic started and the history leading up to it was found in news articles, books, and online videos. I have provided many links for someone who may want more information in one area and thereby can learn more. Since the U.S. government was suppressing information via social media, a lot has been buried but we are slowly able to learn what some scientists have believed since the beginning as well as documents that have been made public through citizens who have joined together to fight corruption and return free speech.

Gain-of-Function Research
Uncovering the truth about what is gain-of-function (GOF) research and what is categorized as "enhanced potential pandemic pathogens" or ePPP and how dangerous is it and where it is still being conducted and who is financing it is being debated in the U.S. government right now. Coronaviruses are still being studied in labs around the world and many studies are still being funded under GOF research. This research involves taking a pathogen and mutating it so that it has a new aspect to it such as being more transmissible or deadly to humans, supposedly, in order to prepare or prevent a future epidemic. This research is controversial for several reasons. The first is there have been lab leaks in the past:

• 1978 lab leak of smallpox killed one, quarantined 300;
• 1979 anthrax escaped from a Societ military facility killing more than sixty people who lived downwind;
• 1967 Marburg virus occurred in several laboratories in Europe. Thirty-one people became ill, beginning with laboratory workers, followed by several medical personnel and family members who had cared for them. Seven deaths were reported.
• 2002, an outbreak of the SARS coronavirus that originated in China spread around the world, killing 774 people and infecting more than 8,000. China tried to conceal the problem. When that became impossible, it played down the severity, falsely claiming the epidemic was under control.
• 2003 case of SARS was linked to a Singapore lab;
• 2004 SARS accidentally leaked from a top laboratory in Beijing and led to mini outbreaks.

In 2014, the Obama administration put a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research in the U.S. after researchers announced they made a deadly bird flu virus, H5N1, more contagious in ferrets. The animals were used as a model for how the virus could spread through humans, sparking concerns about its ability to be released into the world.

That moratorium was lifted in 2017 when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) put a new framework in place for researchers who want to conduct and receive funding for gain-of-function research involving “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” or PPPs. It said research on PPPs was “essential to protecting global health and security,” but the risks need to be considered and mitigated in order to evaluate who should receive funding. Supporters of the research, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have stated that it is an important part of preventing future pandemics. By studying how a pathogen could become more dangerous to humans, the next pandemic-potential pathogen could be discovered before a crisis occurs, thereby giving the world time to prepare its response.

Fauci wrote in a 2011 op-ed for The Washington Post, "The ability to identify such viruses even a few months faster than by conventional surveillance provides critical time to slow or stop an outbreak." As well as he said, "facilitating the early stages of manufacturing vaccines that protect against such a virus in advance of an outbreak."

The framework defined PPP as a disease that was both “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations” and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.” 

In a 2015 research paper, Shi Zhengli, senior head of the WIV, and a University of North Carolina virologist named Ralph Baric proved that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could be used to infect human cells. Using mice as subjects, they spliced the spike of a novel SARS-like virus from a bat into a version of the 2003 SARS virus, creating a new infectious pathogen.

Shi later partnered with Baric and a longtime collaborator, Peter Daszak, in March 2018 on a $14 million grant proposal to genetically manipulate bat coronaviruses to see how they might cause pandemics. Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemics. The proposal called for possibly enhancing the viruses with something called a furin cleavage site to boost their entry into human cells. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) rejected the grant proposal for not adequately assessing the risks posed by a supercharged virus.

One possible theory is that WIV scientists continued the research on their own creating a coronavirus with an enhanced spike protein that was particularly good at latching on to human lung cells known as the ACE2 receptor. Two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak,” according to the Times. “The Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to DARPA.” A key hallmark of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is its furin cleavage site (FCS).

A particular focus has been the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding of the EcoHealth Alliance study in 2014, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, which collaborated with scientists at WIV and in six years received $3.7 million of which $600,000 was distributed to the WIV. In 2019, the project was renewed for another five years, but after the coronavirus broke out in the U.S. it was canceled in April 2020. 

The debate about whether EcoHealth Alliance was using GOF is ongoing. As mentioned in a previous release the U.S. government made a systematic effort to get social media companies to censor all explanations other than the zoonotic theory (that the virus sprung from animals to humans). The small subset of virology that is at issue here is not "gain of function" research, but "gain of function research of concern/GoFRoC, also referred to as ePPP. Some promote that GoFRoC is not necessary for vaccine development while these experiments make pathogens more virulent and/or more transmissible. 

The Zoonotic Theory
The Wuhan wet market has been the prevailing theory as to the source of the epidemic where live animals were sold. Around half of the earliest known COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. The majority of the first 41 individuals sick with respiratory illnesses in December 2019 - later identified with COVID - in China were supposedly linked to the market but 13 of those cases were later found to show no link with the market at all. None of the animals at the market tested positive for the virus, but it has been stated no animals were ever tested. The market was shut down on January 1, 2020. Chinese CDC then swabbed walls, floors, and other surfaces, tested meat still in freezers, sampled sewers, and caught mice and stray cats and dogs around the market. It is not clear if they did this before or after they sanitized the market.

A group of scientists wrote an article supporting the zoonotic theory, "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" that was published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020.² Its conclusive remarks stated, "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Several other studies were released around the same time. The new studies suggested a raccoon dog, a dog-like mammal used for food and fur in China was the most likely intermediary host of COVID-19 from bat to human. The Nature Medicine article, co-authored by Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., a virologist, indicates that these animals were sold in a section of the Huanan market where positive viral samples were collected. Raccoon dogs are one of the animals that can harbor coronaviruses.

This article has been cited more than 5,900 times and has been enormously influential in shaping the debate about the origins of COVID-19. However, in July 2023 the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report titled “The Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up: Did the ‘Bethesda Boys’ Downplay a Lab Leak?” which details the Select Subcommittee’s comprehensive investigation into the suppression of the lab-leak hypothesis by America’s leading public health officials and pressuring scientists to endorse the zoonotic theory publicly. More on what this investigation found below.

Connor Reed was the first British man to state that he had Covid. Connor, a 25-year-old from North Wales, was working at a school in the Chinese city of Wuhan when he began to feel ill on the 25th of November, 2019. He finally went to the hospital on December 5th when he couldn't breathe and was diagnosed with pneumonia. But several weeks later his doctors realized he had the new virus going around "COVID-19". He had no contact with the Wuhan wet market.

There is still no evidence of an animal infected with SARS-CoV-2, or a closely related virus, before the first publicly reported human COVID-19 cases in Wuhan in December 2019. China officials have reported to WHO that they still have not found a single SARS-CoV-2 infection in their farmed or wild mink, raccoon dog, or fox populations before or after the COVID-19 pandemic.

U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions released a report "An Analysis of the Origins of the COVID-19 Pandemic" in October 2022 whereby they concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic was "more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident." ³

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT who specializes in gene therapy and cell engineering has been tracking the genetic evolution of SARS-CoV-2 since the beginning of the epidemic. In the article, "Could COVID-19 Have Escaped from a Lab?, Alina describes her findings discrediting the Wuhan Market transmission as false.⁴

During the COVID shutdown, Alina worked analyzing the genetic codes of the SAR. What Chan noticed about the original SARS virus was that the virus in the first human cases was subtly different—a few dozen letters of genetic code—from the one in the civets that carried the disease. That meant it had immediately started morphing after entering humans. Working with a colleague they pulled up the genomes of the coronaviruses that had been found on surfaces in the Wuhan seafood market and found they were 100% the same as the earliest cases reported. Definitely the viruses found at the Wuhan market were from humans, not animals. Had the virus jumped from animals to humans, one would expect to see numerous adaptations, as was true in the 2002 SARS outbreak.The seafood-market theory, which Chinese health officials and the World Health Organization espoused in the early days of the pandemic, was wrong.

The Lab Leak Theory
It has long been in the news that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been sick with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019 and had sought out hospital care. Now, in July 2023, it has been revealed from sources within the US government that three scientists who are believed to be the earliest people to become infected with COVID were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.

However, a senior researcher at WIV, Shi Zhengli, often called the "bat woman", released a statement to the public in 2020 claiming that there were 'zero infections' among the WIV's staff and students of any SARS-related viruses. Shi also claimed there were no Chinese military experiments in the lab. But that statement has been contradicted by the State Department, which said last year that the lab “has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military.”

Ben Hu emailed Science in his first public response to the charges, denying he was ever sick. A WIV colleague who has also been named as one of the first COVID-19 cases denies the accusation as well. However, A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on 20 June "U.S.-Funded Scientist Among Three Chinese Researchers Who Fell Ill Amid Early Covid-19 Outbreak" stated it had “confirmed” the allegations against the three.

Hu and the two other WIV scientists named in media reports, Yu Ping and Zhu Yan, conducted research in the virology lab of Shi Zhengli, who long has collected and studied bat coronaviruses. In 2019, Hu was listed as an investigator for WIV funded funded by American grants to see whether or not two new coronaviruses could infect humans. The intelligence agencies also confirmed that the institute researchers have genetically engineered coronaviruses.

Alina Chan stated to Blaze Media, "Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli. ... He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him."

The WSJ reported that much of Hu's research "focused on modifying coronaviruses so they could bind to human cells. The stated purpose of the research was to identify viruses that could lead to a pandemic and facilitate the development of a vaccine."

Hu makes a probable suspect for lab-leak proponents because he was a lead author on a 2017 paper in  PLOS Pathogens describing an experiment that created chimeric viruses by combining genes for surface proteins from bat coronaviruses that would not grow in cultures with the genome of one that did.⁵ This paper has received intense scrutiny because it was partially funded by the NIH and led to a gain of function in the cultured virus. NIH officials have strongly denied this and noted that the chimeric viruses created were not closely related to SARS-CoV-2. 

Intelligence obtained by members of the US Senate revealed that a man named Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who worked alongside WIV,  filed a patent for a Covid-19 vaccine on February 24, 2020, barely a month after China put Wuhan into lockdown because of the outbreak. US vaccine developers told investigators that it would have been impossible to have generated the data cited in the patent so swiftly – it would have taken about three months’ work, meaning that scientists at the Wuhan Institute for Virology were secretly working on a Covid vaccine in November, two months before Beijing told the world about the pandemic, supporting the idea there was a lab leak.

Zhou, died in mysterious circumstances in May 2020, aged 54, with intelligence stating they were told "he fell from the WIV's roof causing speculation in the scientific community that he was "silenced" to stop him from revealing the truth on the timing and circumstances of the outbreak.

A final note on WIV denials of any gain-of-function research or illnesses or breach of contaminants, Toy Reid, who assisted the State Department in interpreting reports and comments from 16 party branches inside the CCP-operated WIV where they chronicled their party-building exploits in reports uploaded to the WIV’s website stated what is obvious to some and not to others who won't look at the obvious for political or reasons of personal gain. Reid stated, "WIV scientists are not “free agents” who can candidly share what occurred in their laboratories. The WIV is under the thumb of the party state. Just because you can’t see the political pressures they’re under doesn’t mean they’re not under them. American scientists have been slow to realize that.”

For a detailed article on the history of interchange with the Wuhan Lab and their risky experiments and history, as well as the CCP's international response to accusations that there was a lab leak can be found in two articles. An article by Politico, "In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened." gives a clear history of events. And ProPublica's article, "COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a "Complex and Grave Situation" Inside a Wuhan Lab" details findings from the Wuhan Lab Chinese communications that have been translated that an event may have happened within the lab in November 2019 that could very well have been a lab leak."⁶

2019 Military World Games Held in Wuhan, China
What has recently come to light by a Chinese defector reveals a much darker story than that the virus was spread from bats at the Wuhan Market or even a lab leak. The claim is that the central spread of the disease worldwide actually began at the 2019 Military World Games which were held in Wuhan, China from October 18 to October 27, 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted around the world.

The first cases of COVID-19 were believed to have occurred in Wuhan, China in December 2019. We do know that dozens of individuals hospitalized in Wuhan were confirmed to have COVID-19 In December 2019. Yet analyses from medical and environmental information coming out of Italy, France, and the US found results that suggested the virus was circulating prior to December 2019 by several weeks.

The 2019 Military World Games included 9,000 athletes from over 110 countries who competed in more than 27 sports. But there were many more traveling with them. For example, in the U.S. the delegation to Wuhan included 188 athletes, 24 coaches, 18 team captains, 15 medical providers, 10 referees, nine public-affairs officers, seven “senior leaders,” nine CISM (International Military Sports Council), and two State Department personnel, according to Department Of Defense documents. When the games ended these U.S. athletes and their support team returned to at least 219 home bases in 25 states, none were ever tested for COVID-19 infection.

Who reported being sick?
News of athletes returning to their homes sick or ill during the event began appearing on a few independent news sites. But no mainstream newspapers. And as I previously mentioned in this article on COVID-19 if there were any news in the U.S. that did not fit the government's “status quo” on the source of COVID or any facts that opposed the presented facts, the social media venues were threatened by the government if they did not “take care” of the matter. Thus, any proposed links to COVID in these Wuhan games appearing on Twitter or Facebook, were shortly deleted and the channels banned.

In August 2021 U.S. Republicans in the House of Foreign Affairs concluded that the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019 was “one of the earliest super spreader events” during the pandemic, with their report contending COVID-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab in late August or early September 2019 — with China covering it up for months.

The report noted that “four countries who sent delegations” to the Wuhan games “have now confirmed the presence of SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 cases within their borders in November and December 2019” — Italy, Brazil, Sweden, and France — with some athletes complaining of COVID-like symptoms in Wuhan. One athlete from Luxembourg described Wuhan as a “ghost town” and recalled having his temperature taken upon arriving at the city’s airport, saying, “There were rumors that the government warned the inhabitants not to go out.”

The following are some testimonies by attending athletes:

• German volleyball player Jacqueline Brock alleged that she got COVID-19 despite no cases being reported until December. She said: "After a few days, some athletes from my team got ill, I got sick in the last two days. "I have never felt so sick, either it was a very bad cold or COVID-19, I think it was COVID-19."
  
• Swedish pentathlete Melina Westerberg said that many of her compatriots were sick at the Games, but none tested positive for the virus claiming: "It was just a coincidence, we all felt safe."
• Other Swedish athletes also reportedly being unwell, including swimmer Raphael Stacchiotti. These suspected cases support the view of some Swedish epidemiologists that the virus may have been spreading in Sweden as early as November 2019.
• Italian fencer Matteo Tagliarol also said everyone in his apartment in the city fell ill with symptoms "that looked like those of COVID-19". “ I had a fever and cough for three weeks and antibiotics did nothing. Then it spread to my 37-year-old son and his girlfriend."
• Luxembourg triathlete Oliver Gorges said he fell ill with a flu and is now to undergo an antibody test this week to see if he has COVID-19. 
• An Italian athlete said all the athletes in his Wuhan apartment fell ill with “symptoms that looked like those of COVID-19.”
• A military athlete from Canada said that on the return flight, dozens of athletes “were sick with symptoms ranging from coughs to diarrhea.”The whistleblowing Canadian, who could not be named because he was still in the forces identified only as a “senior Canadian Armed Forces member,” said that at the “tail-end” of the games, a lot of the athletes became “really, really, sick”. He said that after eight days, a lot of Canadian athletes began feeling sick with flu-like symptoms such as fever, nausea, and exhaustion as well as with “lung issues, coughing, vomiting, & diarrhea.”
  "I started to get symptoms just before the end of the Games. There were so many cases that a large portion of the plane back had to be quarantined for the sick." He felt so terrible that, driving home from the airport, he had to stop for three days to crash out at a hotel – and was wiped out for six weeks. Almost two years later, he says he is still suffering from what he thinks is long Covid.

There were 176 Canadian soldiers stationed in Wuhan for the Games, and the way the sick in Wuhan—a third of the total contingent of athletes—were quarantined from the others on the long flight home was to put them at the back of the jet. Senior ranks decided to end this quarantine when the flight arrived and sent the soldiers to their homes, all over Canada.  

“When soldiers started asking to be tested, the answer was no,” according to Canadian journalist Keean Bexte. He further stated that the whistle-blowing soldier stated that the main priority for the Canadian government was not to “admit it” and underscored that none of the 176 athletes were tested. The then-Surgeon General, Major-General Downes, wrote a letter on January 22, 2020, addressed to the soldier-athletes who had taken part in the Games. They were told that the Surgeon General was not aware of any coronavirus cases among the Military Games participants and that their risk of having contracted the illness was “negligible.” The above whistleblower said Major-General Downes's memo was followed by an email from the public affairs department ordering them not to talk publicly about their concerns about contracting COVID-19 in Wuhan. Bexte believes the government was covering up for the Chinese for some political reason.

The French delegation was made up of 406 people including 281 athletes who "benefited from medical checks before and during the games with a dedicated medical team made up of about 20 people." French media reported that investigations into the origins of the coronavirus revealed there is a possibility it emerged in Wuhan as early as October 2019 when the games took place. None of the returning athletes were tested and the French Army, who were responsible for organizing their athletes at the military games, reportedly confirmed that they had not wanted to test any athletes either.

According to French media, athletes who were in Wuhan reportedly received telephone calls from the army a few weeks after returning home to reassure them that they did not have the virus. One of these athletes, who remains anonymous, is quoted as saying: "We were told, there is no risk, you left on October 28, and the virus arrived on November 1."

French media also reported that sick athletes were also noted in some other delegations, including the Swedish delegation, with people returning to Sweden with strong fevers.

Despite the French army strenuously contesting the allegations, French Professor Eric Caumes, epidemiologic hospital unit head has subsequently been quoted in French media as saying that "the characteristics of the illness and the symptoms that have been described" by the athletes "make one think that it is COVID-19."

According to Rep. Mike Gallagher, (Republican-Wisconsin), “athletes from France, Germany, Italy, and Luxembourg claimed they had contracted the deadly disease at the Wuhan games, because of their symptoms and how easily their sickness spread to their loved ones." In June 2021 he said that lawmakers were urging the Biden administration to investigate the Wuhan Military Games as a potential super-spreader event.

Could COVID-19 Have Been Deliberately Released By The Chinese?
In a news article in June 2023, a Chinese journalist, Jennifer Zeng, relays an interview with an informant close to Dr. Shan Chao, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A Wuhan Institute researcher claims the coronavirus was created by China as a "bioweapon" and that his colleagues were given four different strains of the virus to determine which one could spread the most.

Zeng is a Chinese labor camp survivor who was imprisoned and tortured for six months because of her religious beliefs. She escaped and was able to flee China with the help of some foreign aid and presently resides in the United States. She has written a book about her experience and formed a media channel called "Inconvenient Truths" related to what is going on in China.

Zeng recently released an expose on how COVID-19 got started in China on her channel. She interviewed an informant close to Dr. Shan Chao, who serves as the deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s high containment lab. Dr. Chao revealed to the informant that In February 2019 he was directed to determine which one of four variants of SARS-CoV-2 was the most infectious to humans. Dr. Chao called them “bioweapons” that had been engineered in the lab. Then he revealed that four co-workers went missing from work during the 2019 Military World Games. One missing lab worker later explained to him that they had been sent seemingly to “check the hygiene conditions” where the athletes were staying. The real purpose was to spread the coronavirus that Chao had identified as the most infectious.

You can hear Jennifer Zeng tell what happened on her channel and in an interview with CNN News-18 and determine for yourself whether these events appear plausible or not.⁷

Yet Jennifer Zeng's report is not the first time this theory was propagated in the U.S. China’s most famous defector to America, Wei Jingsheng, was imprisoned in China for a total of 18 years as a political prisoner for speaking about China needing to add democracy to its plans for modernization. He came to America on medical parole in 1997 and eventually established the Wei Jingsheng Foundation to help improve human rights and advocate democratization in China.

Wei states that he first heard of a mysterious outbreak of a new virus from his contacts in Beijing at the time of the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019. In November 2019—six weeks before China admitted there was an outbreak—he attempted to warn American intelligence agencies, and a U.S. politician with links to the president, as well as Chinese human rights activist Dimon Liu, that there was this virus spreading in Wuhan. 

In an outstanding 2021 documentary, "What Really Happened in Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other" by Australian investigation journalist Sharri Markson, Wei spoke out about this experience.⁸ After being asked if he had any sense the intelligence agencies were taking seriously his intelligence about a new virus in Wuhan, Wei said: “I felt they were not as heavily concerned as I was so I tried my best to provide more detailed information." Markson also interviews in her documentary a range of Chinese whistle-blowers, scientists, and high-ranking intelligence officials including former President Trump, whereby she uncovers and reveals critical new information and remarkable claims about how the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Still, another informant spoke out about the virus being created and released intentionally by the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese Virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan, was a virology and immunology specialist at the Hong Kong School of Public Health until she escaped to America. Yan said that was assigned to investigate a “new pneumonia” in Wuhan where she discovered a cover-up operation on a coronavirus. She has been interviewed several times stating she had evidence to suggest that the virus was intentionally manufactured and released by the Chinese Communist Party.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan stated, "I can present solid scientific evidence to our audience that this virus, SARS-CoV-2 virus, is actually not from nature," she said. "It is a man-made virus created in the lab based on the China … the very unique bat coronavirus, which cannot affect people, but after the modification becomes a very harmful virus."

Dr. Li-Meng Yan published, along with her team of researchers, a 26-page document laying out her theory that the pandemic sweeping the world is not of natural origin and published their findings on Zenodo (not yet peer reviewed) in a report entitled “Unusual Features of the SARS CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route.”⁹

Dr. Yan also states that she was poisoned upon leaving China and she has been threatened several times so she is in hiding. Although her statements and paper have been highly criticized and mocked, she said she has spoken to the FBI "many times" and claimed the intelligence officials believe she is "very credible" and that before she fled China, her information was wiped from government databases and people were recruited to spread rumors about her.

The Naysayers to Lab Theory
If the majority of scientists agree that a lab leak of the coronavirus was impossible would most not disagree with them since virologists are supposed to be the experts in the field of viruses? Headlines from a March 2020 Science News article reads: "No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab. A genetic analysis shows it’s from nature".¹⁰ When scientists were asked if they believe if it is possible that coronavirus could have escaped from a lab, the answer, according to many scientists is a resounding “No.” 

As mentioned above, one of the main theories for the coronavirus source that caused COVID-19 was that the virus evolved naturally before spilling over into humans from infected animals. This is the theory most predominant with what scientists are promoting "according to their science". But are they really backing up their theory with all facts or is there another agenda behind their viewpoint? One scientist stated that “They (scientists) can’t speak directly,” revealing that "one scientist told me confidentially," referring to the virology community’s fear of having their comments sensationalized in today’s politically charged environment “Many virologists don’t want to be hated by everyone in the field.”

Whatever President Trump backed, the liberals and liberal mainstream newspapers discounted and ripped apart. Trump was asked by a reporter in early 2020: "Have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus?" He replied, "Yes, I have. Yes, I have and I think the World Health Organization [WHO] should be ashamed of themselves because they're like the public relations agency for China." Trump went on to say he could not reveal his source. Hence, the mainstream news denied any possibility of a lab leak and promoted the theory of the Wuhun Market as the virus source for political reasons and financial.

Western scientists highly defended the zoonotic theory after conspiracy theories spread about a lab leak or worse. In February 2020 Lancet published a statement signed by 27 scientists where they stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” It would later emerge that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, the recipient of a lot of federal grants.

Scientists who held an open mind and dared to suggest a lab-leak theory was still viable were in danger not just from the left-wing party line people but from fellow scientists. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair.

In May 2021, President Joe Biden ordered the intelligence community to “redouble” its efforts to find out the virus’ origin. Why? This order came about after two public releases. First, The Wall Street Journal reported that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had symptoms consistent with COVID and were hospitalized in November 2019.  Second, a letter was published in the journal Science in May 2021 calling forth a "determination in promoting a dispassionate science-based discourse" on discovering the truth of the COVID origins. They were responding to a March 2021 WHO report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, which said a lab leak was "extremely unlikely".

One signer was computational virologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center who gained acclaim (and notoriety) by discovering that coronavirus genetic sequences from the early days of the pandemic that had been deleted from a NIH archive — at the request of Chinese scientists. After much digging and computer finesse, he was able to find backed-up copies of these sequences after they were deleted. Those samples bore unusual similarities to bat coronaviruses.

Bloom said his findings suggested the coronavirus was already circulating in Wuhan before being linked to COVID-19 outbreaks at the Huanan Seafood Market. They also suggested the sequences used in most studies into the virus' origins, including the joint WHO-China report, "are not fully representative of the viruses actually present in Wuhan at that time," he said.

He and 17 other scientists published their letter in the journal Science because many other scientists had previously come forth stating a lab leak was not possible and they did so because President Trump said it was not only possible but highly likely. A lot of the media, scientists, and others were moving away from the truth just in opposition to the President whom they despised. These top eighteen scientists who published in Science thought a lab leak was very possible.

Biden revealed that the intelligence community is split between two theories about COVID-19’s origin, and said the review will examine “whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins by Vanity Fair was published in June 2021 and covers a tremendous amount of information about what happened between scientists, the U.S. government, China and the WIV, revealing insights into a long, but organized manner.

On July 14, 2023, an article in Washington Examiner called, "How Fauci and NIH leaders worked to discredit the COVID-19 lab leak theory" summed up the interim report released a few days earlier by the Republican staff of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.¹¹ The document is backed up by a collection of more than 8,000 documents, including emails and other communications, plus nearly 25 hours of witness testimony.

The U.S. House of Representatives investigators'  interim report  “The Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up: Did the ‘Bethesda Boys’ Downplay a Lab Leak?”¹² details sophisticated efforts by leaders at the NIH and a select group of researchers—including those who had received substantial NIH grant funding—to disprove the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese research laboratory and push the narrative that it instead emerged from nature.

The report describes how NIH and Fauci used a prominent science journal Nature, the world's leading multidisciplinary science journal, to discredit the “lab leak” theory. Encouraging an international team of prominent scientists they encouraged them to debunk the notion that the pandemic could have originated in a lab. The paper was created and an initial draft was submitted to Nature, but the journal turned it down because the editors wanted a stronger dismissal of the lab leak theory according to one of the original authors of the paper who testified to the House subcommittee, “They thought that we came down too strongly on the side that the virus had been of possible lab origin.” he said. So, the authors revised their paper, adding language that the lab origin was implausible, and successfully submitted it and published March 2020.

The Nature Medicine article, according to the subcommittee report, “is one of the single most impactful and influential scientific papers in history, and it expressed conclusions that were not based on sound science, nor in fact, but instead on assumptions.” 

Remember from a previous COVID article I related that there was a serious effort by the US government to prevent Americans from even openly speculating about the lab-leak theory on social media platforms? The government had been threatening social media platforms to ban alternative theories contrary to the government's stand.

It was in February 2021 Facebook announced after following the pressure from federal agencies to censor alternate views from the government status quo, that it would remove posts that suggested "COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured". Months later, after it became widely accepted that the lab-leak theory was not "a crackpot idea" after all, Facebook retracted its violation policy upon learning President Joe Biden had ordered the intelligence community to “redouble” its efforts to find out the virus’ origin. 

Then in early July 2023, a federal judge in Louisiana issued a ruling that limits the Biden administration’s communication with social media platforms regarding a wide range of online content, including false narratives about the coronavirus pandemic.¹³ The judge’s order, which has First Amendment implications, comes amid a legal battle over the boundaries of online speech.

Censorship of Wuhan Lab Leak - Now Accepted As a Possibility
For many years there have been public concerns from the U.S. about China’s past biological weapons work. China has a history of being secret and using non-disclosure in many areas. Despite China's clear obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention and treaty, Beijing has neither documented its past biological weapons work nor demonstrably eliminated biological weapons.

It is not hard to imagine that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was developing gain-of-function of concern research into coronaviruses as they previously had done so with research to engineer chimeric viruses. Since China has not been open to letting anyone get information or gain access to the Wuhan Institute there is only speculation—until now.

President Biden directed eight federal agencies to further investigate the virus' origin in May 2021. Finally, in February 2023 the controversial claim that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory—considered a fringe conspiracy theory as stated above—was reinstituted with FBI Director Christopher Wray's comments that the bureau believes COVID-19 "most likely" originated in a "Chinese government-controlled lab". First reported by the WSJ the Department of Energy, which oversees a system of laboratories in the U.S., changed its stance from undecided -- becoming the second agency, after the FBI, to believe a lab accident resulted in the global health emergency. Four other agencies lean toward it being a natural transmission but with low confidence; two haven't made a judgment either way, the CIA being one of these two; and now the other two lean toward a lab leak. The FBI says it has moderate confidence that it was a lab leak and the Energy Department saying with low confidence. The Energy Department did produce a new report but the intelligence in it is classified, so the evidence that apparently persuaded the Energy Department to change its assessment is not available to the public.

God is in Control
Ultimately, God is in control. His ways are not ours unless we submit our lives to Him. While we can do that on a personal level we are also reminded that Satan rules this world. It is God's world but Satan has power over all the nations. Jesus calls him the ruler of this world John 14:30. He influences people's attitudes by affecting our reasoning processes towards putting the self first and fulfilling its satisfactions first. When our attention focuses on our fame, power, or money and fulfilling them we may lose focus on God and caring for the needs of others who may be in far worse shape than ourselves.

Looking at the leaders of nations and those who have been given power within them to make decisions and control the nation's finances it is not hard to discover corruption within. In democratic nations, the people choose their leadership but if the people are focused on their personal needs first and ignore God and our Creator they are not going to choose the leadership that is capable of serving the people and the good of the nation.

As Christians, it is our responsibility to pray for others especially those who are under the influence of evil and are in positions of power to foment their evil ways that can cause great harm to others. We also need to pray for those who righteously stand for truth and do so at the risk of losing their careers and even their lives - who are warriors of truth. We need to pray for our leaders to do the will of God and to turn away from evil. Pray for their conversion to righteousness. Pray for the people who are warriors for truth. Pray for the exposure of the lies that is the hallmark of the devil.

I have personally experienced the ramifications of lies and the ruthlessness of narcissists who are chronic liars and have no desire to change. They can deftly lead others to believe them over truth. So many people today have believed the lies because they put their needs first. Imagine what life would be like if every parent raised their children under this type of mentality. It is not hard to find news stories almost every day that reveal another child has died from brutal treatment from a parent or guardian or hear survivors stories of horrific childhoods.

God has blessed every parent by giving them the opportunity to learn to sacrifice and love and care for their children in a manner that nurtures and fosters love and sacrifice in them. We learn and grow in love under God's guidance if we accept that God is the ruler of our world. For those who learned from an early age the ways of Satan they are given a choice as all of us are whether we will entertain evil. We all have sinned and made bad choices and hopefully have asked for forgiveness over the course of our lives. But for those who see no wrong in harming others, or the people who have little or no faith in God, they may have little or no remorse in harming others or see no wrong in stepping on others to fulfill their personal needs.

Let us pray with all our hearts for all people. Remember ours is a spiritual battle against dark forces, not people.

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¹YouGov survey, "Two-thirds of Americans believe that the COVID-19 virus originated from a lab in China", March 2023.

²"The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", main authors Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut,  W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes & Robert F. Garry published in Nature Medicine March 17, 2020.

³Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions, An Analysis of the Origins of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Interim Report, by the Minority Oversight Staff, October 2022.

⁴Boston Magazine, "Could COVID-19 Have Escaped from a Lab?", Alina Chan's discovery, September 2020.

⁵PLOS Pathegens, "Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus", co-authored by November 2017.

⁶Politico, "In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened." March 8, 2021. ProPublica's article, "COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a "Complex and Grave Situation" Inside a Wuhan Lab" October 28, 2022.

⁷Jennnifer Zeng, Chinese-born human rights activist and author, has her own YouTube channel here, where she releases interviews on the Chinese cover-up. This video is a question and answer with CNN-News18 with Zeng in June 2023.

⁸"What Really Happened in Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths" documentary by Australian journalist Sharri Markson, June 14, 2023.

⁹Dr. Li-Meng Yan published a report entitled, “Unusual Features of the SARS CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route.”

¹⁰ March 2020 Science News article, "No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab. A genetic analysis shows it’s from nature".

¹¹Washington Examiner article, "How Fauci and NIH leaders worked to discredit the COVID-19 lab leak theory", July 14, 2023, summing up the interum report released by House Select Subcommittee.

¹²The U.S. House of Representatives investigators July 11, 2023 interim report,  “The Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up: Did the ‘Bethesda Boys’ Downplay a Lab Leak?”

¹³Article from NPR "After Missouri lawsuit, U.S. is barred from combating disinformation on social media" July 6, 2023.