Wuhan lab key to finding answers to Covid mystery

Three-and-a-half years after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic that infected 700 million people across the world and killed almost seven million, too little remains known about the origin of the virus. In The Weekend Australian Magazine on Saturday, investigative journalist and Sky News host Sharri Markson casts clear new light on the subject. Robert Kadlec, the former assistant secretary for the US Department of Health and Human Services, says he believes the virus escaped from a laboratory. “We think vaccine research resulted in the pandemic,” he said. “They were likely working on a ­vaccine, it looks like they had a bio-containment failure.” As Markson reported last month, Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers were working on defensive and biosecurity projects for the Chinese military but their biosafety precautions while handling coronaviruses were inadequate, declassified US intelligence has confirmed.

In Saturday’s report, Dr Kadlec reveals the top US infectious diseases adviser, Anthony Fauci, did not tell him about the full extent of suspicions privately expressed by leading virologists that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory. The full extent of those suspicions is now set out in emails subpoenaed by the US congress and published in recent weeks. Dr Kadlec said he found it “really odd”, in light of the private musings of scientists who thought the virus looked unusual, that they published an article in Nature Medicine in March 2021 arguing the opposite.

“I think Tony Fauci was ­trying to protect his institution and his own reputation from the possibility that his agency was funding the Wuhan ­Institute of Virology researchers who, beyond the scope of the grants received from the NIH (National Institutes of Health), may have been working with People’s Liberation Army researchers on defensive coronavirus vaccines,” Dr Kadlec told Markson. “This was a reputational risk to him and his ­institute, and certainly he probably sided with the international scientists that believed that false or unsubstantiated accusations could have a chilling effect on scientific collaboration between the Western world and China.” Dr Fauci was in Brisbane this week for an International AIDS Society conference.

US intelligence agencies are pursuing the theory that Zhou Yusen, a People’s Liberation Army scientist who is now dead and who was developing a vaccine for the Chinese military, could have inadvertently led to the creation of Covid-19 and the first cluster of the pandemic. Zhou may have been working in the lab with junior scientist Ben Hu, named recently as patient zero. A close relative of Zhou in the US has been interviewed twice by the FBI following the 2021 release of Markson’s book, What really happened in Wuhan. The agency was seeking clues about the outbreak of the virus.

Markson’s Weekend Australian article, and the interest in her book from US authorities, reinforces the international significance of her groundbreaking research. She wrote the book after breaking a series of stories for this newspaper and The Daily Telegraph in 2020 and 2021. In his media column on Monday, Chris Mitchell rightly called out the mealy-mouthed approach of the ABC, especially Media Watch, to one of the most important exposes in Australia for years. Media Watch in May 2020, he noted, devoted most of two full programs trying to delegitimise Markson’s reporting, and has attacked her several times since.

Her work, however, is standing the test of time. Participants in the debate over the origins of the virus acknowledge the dangers of another pandemic. In light of that possibility, it is essential that scientists, governments and the public know as much as possible about the complex factors behind Covid-19. On available evidence, Markson has asked questions and explored possibilities that others were afraid to consider.