The Covid cover-up
Sharri Markson’s hard-hitting book shows China wasn’t alone in suppressing crucial information about the Covid-19 pandemic.
Award-winning journalist and television host Sharri Markson admits that before she wrote her explosive book, What Really Happened In Wuhan, she had never wanted to be an author. “It’s never been a passion of mine or an ambition at all,’’ she reveals.
However, as a tenacious reporter pursuing one of the most urgent stories of our time, Markson believed a vital issue was being suppressed, not just in China, but in the US and within media, scientific and intelligence circles: the theory that the Covid-19 virus may have leaked from a controversial laboratory in Wuhan, China. The Wuhan Institute of Virology houses one of the world’s largest collections of bat pathogens, has links to the Chinese military, conducts risky virus experiments and is located in the same city where the pandemic began.
Markson recalls vividly the day she decided to write What Really Happened in Wuhan, her hard-hitting forensic investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was February 10 this year and at that point, “everyone thought this (the lab leak hypothesis) was a conspiracy theory,” she tells Review. “It was on that day the World Health Organisation said a lab leak was extremely unlikely, and I just on the spot felt so angry. I knew then I had to write a book to put all the pieces together and to explain how this is not extremely unlikely; how this is a very plausible scenario for how the pandemic started.’’
At that stage, the two-time Walkley Award winner and four-time Kennedy Award winner had been filing reports for almost a year on the pandemic, producing regular front-page scoops for The Daily Telegraph and The Australian. Now The Australian’s investigations editor, Markson knew it would be “difficult” to write a complex book heavily focused on China and the US from her Sydney home during a pandemic, “but I was motivated to do it because I believed so strongly that this was an important topic and that it wasn’t being explored or taken seriously by the world at large … 4.7 million people have died and there has been no credible investigation internationally into why this pandemic started.”
She set to work, chasing down hundreds of interviewees who spoke to her on and off the record, obtaining official Chinese and American documents and cross-checking her understanding of scientific papers with eminent scientists. “I feel like I’ve had a snap degree in virology,” she writes in her author’s note.
Although she is a busy working mum – her son, Raphi, is two – she gave herself a manuscript deadline so tight it would make most seasoned journalists weep. “I mostly wrote the book in April and May,” says the host of Sharri on Sky News Australia. “I’ve never worked harder in my life. I was working from 4.30 or five in the morning until 11.30, 12 at night. I didn’t even go for walks. That was all I did.”
(Her parents, Max and Ro, were recruited for intensive babysitting and she reveals in a moving author’s note that her grandmother, Stella, died from Covid-19 in January this year “in a UK nursing home that did not provide her access to a doctor, a hospital or even fluids. She was effectively left to fend for herself”.)
Across 422 pages, What Really Happened in Wuhan takes readers from the hospital wards of China during the first, terrifying days of the pandemic to heated discussions inside the Oval Office, and is being published in Australia, Britain and the US by HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corp, publisher of The Australian. As she sat down to write her debut book – believed to be the first international work to investigate the lab leak theory – Markson was offered the chance to develop a companion Foxtel documentary and a podcast. She says with a self-deprecating chuckle: “I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, there’s no way I’ll be able to do that’. But then I said ‘Yes’ … and I just panicked afterwards.”
For her book, Markson has secured extraordinary access to international powerbrokers, scoring interviews with former US Secretary of State and ex-CIA boss Mike Pompeo, the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove, Pompeo’s key China adviser Miles Yu, and Donald Trump’s last national security adviser, Robert O’Brien. She also talks to one of China’s best-known defectors, Wei Jingsheng, who tried to sound the alarm in Washington in November 2019 about a new mystery disease rampaging through Wuhan.
Markson’s documentary of the same name screened in Australia and in the US this week and was the most watched program on Sky News so far this year. In a journalistic coup, she secured an exclusive interview with Trump. The former US president told her that dead bodies had been left outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “I started hearing stories … that there were lots of body bags outside of the lab,” Trump told Markson. “I heard that a long time ago. And if they did in fact have body bags, that was one little indication, wasn’t it?”
In the documentary, John Ratcliffe, the US director of national intelligence from 2020 to 2021, concluded that most of the intelligence he had seen pointed to a lab leak. “This is most likely what happened,” he said.
Yet for almost 18 months after the pandemic began, many prominent scientists, journalists, intelligence and government officials insisted the Covid-19 virus had a natural origin; the dominant scientific view was that it emerged in bats and jumped to humans, probably through a different animal. Although the origins of Covid-19 remain a mystery, those who dared to report a contrary view – as Markson had done – were censored or mocked as “conspiracy theorists”.
Markson, joint winner of the 2019 Press Gallery Political Journalist of the Year prize, is an exceptionally determined journalist who has covered big, contentious stories before. Her Walkley Award-winning scoop about self-described moral conservative Barnaby Joyce having a baby with his then-mistress cost the deputy prime minister his job in 2017.
Yet she found it “very uncomfortable” and “upsetting” to be accused of peddling conspiracy theories by other journalists “when I was doing what I saw as straight news reports – front-page stories in The Daily Telegraph, simply reporting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was being investigated by intelligence agencies as a possible source for the origin of the virus. That was a factual, straight story that I broke; that was a world exclusive.”
The secretive Institute is at the heart of Markson’s narrative. She writes that it was genetically manipulating bat coronaviruses in highly risky experiments that had the potential to spark a pandemic. Its safety practices had caused alarm long before anyone had heard of Covid-19, yet its research was partly funded by the US. She also cites evidence showing the Chinese military have been closely involved with the lab since 2017.
As she researched her book, she was surprised to learn of the hostility to the lab leak theory among the American intelligence community and figures within the US State Department. “The intelligence community’s failure to properly examine the origin of Covid-19 is one of the biggest stories of this entire catastrophe,” she writes. Former American East Asia diplomat David Stilwell tells her this failure “is the cover-up of the century. This makes Watergate look easy”.
In the book, Trump officials give astonishingly frank accounts of fractious Oval Office clashes over the likely origin of the virus. There was unease about pandemic investigators who wanted to look into the lab leak hypothesis, given that the US had been helping to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Markson says: “It was extraordinary to me that even in Pompeo’s State Department, the people who were spearheading the taskforce investigating the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, even they were meeting resistance, and that evidence was being suppressed by the intelligence agencies.” She says there were two reasons for this: After Trump said “there was evidence for a lab leak, they didn’t want to give him any credibility. Secondly, it was also because it would expose – and this was a big point – America’s involvement in funding this research. As one official says in the book, it would open up a can of worms, which it has done now … It took a few months to do it but we’re now having that discussion.”
The lab leak narrative has gained significant momentum since US President Joe Biden asked American intelligence agencies to examine the origin issue in May this year. Says Markson: “That probe found in August 2021 that both human contact with an infected animal and a lab leak were plausible explanations for the pandemic starting.” Most US agencies favoured the former hypothesis, but with “low confidence”. (The Chinese government still strenuously rejects the lab accident theory.)
What Really Happened in Wuhan tracks what Markson calls China’s “massive cover-up” during the pandemic’s first phase, as terrified Covid patients found themselves sharing rooms with dead bodies in Wuhan hospitals. One doctor she talks to was ordered to keep working after he fell ill with Covid-19. Courageous Chinese whistleblowers tried to warn their fellow citizens about this new, lethal disease but were punished, publicly shamed or disappeared.
Markson marshals evidence suggesting the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan started earlier than the Chinese government has admitted. She also concludes America and some in the Trump administration were “thoroughly conned” by the Communist Party’s misinformation as the virus tore through the city. “By the time they realised the con, the pandemic had spread around the world,” she writes. She argues the Communist Party’s culpability in covering up the initial outbreak is as “shameful” and “abhorrent” as the Tiananmen Square massacre. (However, no one she interviewed, apart from Wei Jingsheng, argued that the coronavirus outbreak was intentional.)
Her book is critical of the World Health Organisation’s failure to challenge China’s lack of transparency, and of Trump’s initially chaotic approach to the pandemic. Markson writes that Trump was praising China’s transparency at the same time the Communist Party cover-up was in full swing, and she notes how he once characterised the pandemic as a “hoax”.
“Trump was praising China for being transparent,” says Markson, “when it couldn’t have been further from the truth. China was deliberately suppressing and hiding all information related to the outbreak and yet Trump was sitting there publicly tweeting and in media interviews praising China.”
What Really Happened in Wuhan also exposes cover-ups and conflicts of interest among some influential scientists who believe Covid-19 was likely the result of human contact with an infected animal. Markson agrees this is a possibility, as viruses including SARS-COV1, MERS, HIV and many strains of influenza have arisen from wildlife.
But when respected scientists such as Australia’s vaccine expert Nikolai Petrovsky argued the Covid-19 virus could have been man-made, they were blocked from publication or accused of being conspiracy theorists. MI6’s Dearlove says it was an “absolute scandal” that leading science journals including Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine rejected views opposing the natural origin theory. According to Markson, this led to the false assumption of a scientific consensus that the virus had a natural, zoonotic origin, leaving China’s claim – that there was no lab leak – as the preferred narrative.
She says: “Whether or not they realised it, the science community were complicit in the cover-up and they were complicit in spreading China’s version of events, China’s narrative and disinformation. The narrative was that this could only have been a natural origin when, at the very least, the intelligence from Biden’s probe said that both options are plausible.”
The myth of a scientific consensus can partly be traced to a letter by 27 scientists published by The Lancet in March 2020 and denouncing claims Covid-19 could have originated in a lab. It was later revealed that many of these scientists had links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This year, says Markson, 43 international scientists including Petrovsky have signed four letters calling for investigations into the lab leak hypothesis. Scientists, she writes, also have started to speak out about “unusual aspects” of the Covid-19 virus sequence that could point to genetic manipulation possibly aimed at making it more infectious.
Despite deeply troubling questions surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, US government agencies had helped to fund its research for many years, according to Markson’s book. Anthony Fauci, the public face of America’s pandemic health strategy, has admitted he agreed to fund coronavirus research in China because the 2002-03 SARS outbreak was caused by a virus jumping species from a bat to a civet cat to humans, so “it is incumbent upon us to study the animal-human interface”. He also backed research in China to avoid a viral outbreak on US soil.
However, Markson points out the Wuhan Institute was “working with the most lethal pathogens known to humankind” – and using US taxpayers’ dollars but without US oversight of the facility. “The whole world says we need China to open up to do an investigation,” she says. “But in fact, the US agencies that were actually funding the research were not being transparent either. They were covering it up just as much; people are having to submit FOIs to get scraps of information.”
Fauci has rejected allegations he deliberately suppressed the lab leak theory. In 2020, he argued that the Covid-19 virus was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human”. More recently, he said this was still the likely scenario, but added: “It could have been a lab leak.”
Having finished her extensively researched book, what is Markson’s view about the source of the pandemic? “I don’t want to tell people what to think,” she replies. “That’s not what I’ve done with this book; it doesn’t editorialise.” While she acknowledges “it’s possible that this virus started naturally through human contact with an infected animal”, she says “the preponderance of evidence points to a leak of either a natural or manipulated virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But I want people decide for themselves after reading all the facts in the book.”
As she raced to meet her deadline, she worked with three part-time researchers. One of them, Luke McWilliams, is “an incredible China analyst” who discovered the Wuhan Institute’s database had been taken offline shortly before the pandemic and who exposed the Chinese military’s involvement with the institution.
Markson has always been driven: she began her journalism career aged just 16, as a copy girl at The Sunday Telegraph. At 28, she was appointed editor of Cleo and relaunched the glossy magazine to focus less on sex and more on investigative reporting. She left a year later, when the title was merged with teen mag Dolly.
She hosts the show, Sharri, on Sky News Australia, offering her take on the week’s politics, and has also worked for the Seven Network and The Daily Telegraph, often specialising in the type of investigative reporting that underpins her book.
What impact does she hope What Really Happened in Wuhan will have? She says she wants to show readers how, in the middle of a once-in-a-century health crisis, “the world’s biggest authoritarian government has managed to have their narrative take hold at the expense of finding out why this virus might have started”.
“I wanted to put all the details I’d uncovered together in a clear narrative to explain that there needs to be a proper investigation about whether this pandemic might have started with an incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology … and just expose the cover-ups.”
The first-time author could have opted for a more relaxed deadline and brought her book out next year, but she says: “I was so determined to get this done. No one was putting pressure on me. I wanted it out quickly because I wanted the world to know about this before another year had gone by without anything being investigated. I wanted to change the narrative.”
What Really Happened in Wuhan, by Sharri Markson, HarperCollins, $34.99, is out on Wednesday and is available for pre-order from Booktopia.
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