In fact, a laboratory origin is the only logical and plausible conclusion for how a contagious coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China.
There has never been any substantial evidence for a zoonotic origin of Covid-19, despite teams of scientists searching ardently for an animal – any animal – that could have conceivably been a host species.
From the first moment news of a new coronavirus broke, leading scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology panicked they were responsible.
The so-called ‘bat lady’, Shi Zhengli, fretted as she caught a train back to Wuhan, while, over in America, Anthony Fauci emailed his deputy asking if their institute had funded gain of function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan. This American funding breached the ban instituted under the Obama administration.
Not long afterwards, a cover-up of extraordinary proportions began, where arrogant scientists told the world the idea of a laboratory leak was preposterous.
They called the theory a “conspiracy”, even as they discussed in private email correspondence that the virus could have been created in a lab.
Eminent US scientists and bureaucrats had much at stake – their carefully-curated, high-profile reputations were on the line, along with millions of dollars in grants and funding.
All would have been destroyed by the revelation America had funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which led to the creation of Covid-19.
Medical journals also rejected articles that supported a lab-leak thesis, confounding the public narrative that Covid-19 was certainly a naturally-occurring virus. An unscientific ‘letter’ became the gospel on the matter, despite its obvious lack of evidence or academic rigour.
These trusted institutions breached the faith of unsuspecting global citizens.
It took months and months for this web of deceit to be unpicked, on these very pages in The Australian, and, when it was exposed, the public outrage was understandable.
Scientists were the architects of their own ruined reputations.
In the American intelligence agencies, there was also complicity in perpetuating the natural-origins narrative, mirroring that of the scientific establishment.
In one of their earliest statements on the matter, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the 18 US intelligence agencies, insisted that Covid-19 was not a man-made virus.
This was a false and utterly misleading statement for which there has never been an apology or formal retraction.
Critical intelligence, that ‘patient zero’ was a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was suppressed.
The highly-classified intel may have stayed buried had it not been for a diligent team of Covid investigators who refused to look the other way, despite roadblocks internally at the State Department.
The team uncovered intelligence that the first cluster of the pandemic were scientists researching coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who were hospitalised with Covid-specific symptoms around October 2019.
Former President Joe Biden’s own probe into the origins of Covid also silenced intelligence-agency scientists who concluded Covid-19 was most likely genetically-engineered. Sources familiar with the events that unfolded in that top-secret investigation said the scientists were shocked when their input was removed from the final report.
These systemic failures of the intelligence community only aided the Chinese Communist Regime’s cover-up of its own culpability.
This is truly despicable when you think that the Chinese leadership chose to ‘disappear’ scientists, doctors and journalists who bravely tried to expose the truth.
What we know now about the origins of Covid-19 is despite, rather than owing to, the US intelligence community and its vast resources.
Our knowledge of the origins of the pandemic is thanks to diligent independent investigators, dedicated bureaucrats and politicians, passionate journalists and honourable scientists.
It’s taken hundreds of hours of investigation and reporting over five years to unpick the webs of connections involved in this unjustifiable cover-up – and investigate the true origins of the virus.
It’s no thanks to feeble politicians like Anthony Albanese, who demanded an investigation over the accidental death of one Australian, Zomi Frankcom, but would never dare raise with China the need for an investigation into the origins of a virus that killed more than seven million people.
Worse, the Albanese government criticised Scott Morrison for having the courage to call for an origins inquiry.
Our knowledge of how the pandemic began is also despite the lies told by Anthony Fauci, who admitted in a 2012 paper, that we uncovered in The Australian, that gain-of-function research could spark a pandemic – but forged on regardless. He even admitted that he funded risky coronavirus research in China to avoid an outbreak in Hoboken, New Jersey.
What should the consequences be for a powerful figure who breaches a federal ban on risky research in order to fund a little-known Chinese city, if this research then leads to a global pandemic where millions of people die?
We will never know the punishment for such an action because in his final act as president, Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned Anthony Fauci.
This pre-emptive pardon should enrage every family who lost a loved one to Covid-19 and every global citizen impacted by this virus.
That the CIA has only now, after five years, proffered a low-confidence assessment in a likely lab leak is a reflection of the Biden administration’s ideologically-driven operations and extreme ineptitude.
There’s reason to be hopeful that under the Trump administration any remaining intelligence will be declassified and China will finally be called upon to provide evidence relating to all that it has withheld from the public domain, including its secretive Wuhan Institute of Virology virus database.
Sharri Markson is the host of Sharri, 8pm weeknights on Sky News Australia.
Vance blunders in Greenland
The US should have bigger preoccupations than Greenland.
Power bills in focus as PM backtracks on modelling
The Coalition needs to produce clear figures as soon as possible.
Five years after a new coronavirus swept the world, the CIA’s assessment that it’s of likely laboratory origin comes as no surprise to anyone who has closely followed this topic.