Whatever happened in Wuhan changed the world
After 230 million cases, 4.7 million deaths, incalculable hardships and economies shut down, the Covid-19 pandemic remains the defining issue of the current age. Its genesis in Wuhan, China remains mysterious – dangerously so. In March last year, The Australian’s investigations editor, Sharri Markson, noted in a column that Five Eyes intelligence agencies believed the virus might have been the result of an inadvertent leak from a Wuhan scientific laboratory rather than something that arose in the city’s wet market, the theory that was widely accepted throughout the world at the time. After Scott Morrison’s eminently sensible call for a thorough inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, China imposed billions of dollars in sanctions on Australian exports – coal, wine, barley, meat, wood and seafood.
Determined to pursue the truth, Markson got on the trail with old-fashioned reporting – asking questions, making contacts and studying documents. In one of her early breakthroughs, she reported on the work of two People’s Liberation Army scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Zhou Yusen and the institute’s “Bat Woman”, Shi Zhengli. Contrary to claims from World Health Organisation investigators whose efforts to discover the facts were perfunctory and severely limited by Chinese restrictions, Markson revealed that bats were housed at the Wuhan Institute. Week in, week out, new pieces of the puzzle came to light and were fitted into the big picture. The lab theory, initially scoffed at by left-wing media critics in Australia, gained international traction.
A probe ordered by Joe Biden found human contact with an infected animal and a laboratory leak were both plausible explanations for Covid-19’s origins. And in June came a bombshell many Americans and Australians found almost impossible to believe. Markson reported that the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by physician Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to successive US presidents, funded risky research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with PLA scientists. The aim of the research was to genetically manipulate coronaviruses. Its timing was extraordinary – shortly before the pandemic hit in late 2019. Had the link between Dr Fauci and the Wuhan lab been known as bodies piled up in makeshift morgues in the US at the height of the crisis, public outrage would have forced inquiries.
It beggars belief that, as former president Donald Trump’s top medical adviser on the coronavirus, Dr Fauci was in the inner sanctum, at every meeting on the virus as it started to spread globally. But, Mr Trump told Markson on Monday night’s Sky News Australia documentary, What Really Happened in Wuhan, Dr Fauci never once told him the Wuhan Institute of Virology was genetically manipulating coronaviruses. Initially, Dr Fauci publicly insisted that Covid-19 came from an animal. He now acknowledges that the virus may have originated at the Wuhan Institute.
Markson’s book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, published by HarperCollins, is available now. And the revelations continue to come thick and fast. On Monday night Mr Trump told Markson there were body bags dumped outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that an infected scientist had lunch with his girlfriend and spread the virus, later dying. And former secretary of state Mike Pompeo suggests the first incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have occurred as early as July or August 2019, five months before China told the WHO that it had a Covid outbreak.
In one of the most telling revelations, Markson discovered the Wuhan Institute bought a coronavirus PCR testing machine on November 6, 2019, during a spending spree in which it beefed up its security, replaced its air-ventilation system and bought a new medical waste incinerator. That spending spree, coincidentally – or not – began on September 12, 2019, the day the institute deleted its database containing genetic sequences of 22,000 coronaviruses. The spending was listed in tender documents expunged from the internet and recovered by cyber security firm Internet 2.0 during Markson’s investigations for her book. The revelations raise grave questions that the Chinese, if they have any good faith, must answer, assuming the records have not been destroyed. Courageous dissidents and intelligence agents keen to shed light on the issue, fortunately, have been less reticent.
As Markson writes on Tuesday, according to former US director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe, the first cluster of pandemic patients were Wuhan Institute of Virology workers who were hospitalised with Covid-19 in October 2019. Some are now missing.
Vital questions remain. In May, The Australian reported on a Chinese-language document written five years before the start of the pandemic. Coronaviruses, it said, heralded a “new era of genetic weapons” that could be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before”. The document claimed bioweapons could be mass-produced at 0.05 per cent of the cost of traditional weapons in terms of damage per square kilometre. Only time, whistleblowers and investigative reporting might prove whether that assessment was relevant to the world’s current struggles with Covid-19.