US must come clean on what it’s hiding about Covid origins

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a news conference at the White House.

It’s more than four years since Covid-19 broke out in China and almost four years since it was declared a pandemic. Yet we still don’t know how it started: lab leak or zoonosis. The primary reason we don’t know is that the Chinese Communist Party is determined to bury the truth, as it tries to do with everything that goes wrong on its territory.

But there’s a second guilty party: the US government. Or, rather, certain parties within it. The distinction is vital. Whereas no one can dislodge state secrets from within the clutches of the Chinese Communist Party, which exercises a totalitarian dictatorship over every aspect of Chinese society, the US has a constitution, a division of powers and laws that make extraction of such things possible. This is of enormous importance in the current state of global affairs.

It has long been clear that American scientists with links to national health bodies were involved in supporting and funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The key figures, starting with Anthony Fauci, have fought tooth and nail to deflect attention from that work and to dismiss as conspiracy theory any suggestion the virus originated from that high-risk research laboratory.

Little by little, the tenacious and the exasperated in the US have been working at prying the truth out of the hands of those scientists and their backers in the US government. As we edge into 2024, there is some risk that this issue will become a political football in the presidential campaign. But we should all want and, indeed, demand the unvarnished truth in this matter.

By the World Health Organisation’s conservative estimate, some seven million people died around the world as a direct consequence of infection by Covid-19. Immense collateral costs – financial, social and psychological – were incurred. The handling of the case by the Chinese government was deplorable. That’s where the chief blame plainly lies.

However, the ongoing obstruction within the US government and medical establishment regarding assessments of how the pandemic originated is shocking. The one redeeming feature in all this is that those intent on pinning down the truth are able to. Their counterparts in China simply disappeared.

On April 18 this year, John Ratcliffe, former director of national intelligence under Donald Trump, testified before the US House Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic that a lab leak was the only credible explanation for the pandemic, based on both the available evidence and common sense.

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organisation.

He stated: “If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origins or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long, convincing, even overwhelming – while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous.”

How, then, can it be that the matter remains not only officially unresolved but subject to the withholding of documents bearing on it, and that no one has been held to account for a disaster of global proportions? Or, at the very least, that no responsible US medical party has stood up and said they were involved in collaboration with the Chinese scientists, and it all went horribly wrong?

Analyses within the US intelligence system have issued equivocal findings, which sit very oddly with the opinion candidly expressed by Ratliffe. But on December 22 a lawsuit was initiated against the CIA, by the Oversight Project of the Heritage Foundation, demanding expedited declassification of papers bearing on a claim, by a CIA whistleblower, that six of the Agency’s seven analysts of the matter had been offered “a significant monetary incentive” (ie, a bribe) from within the system to change their judgments in the matter – from lab leak to zoonosis.

Records relating to this matter were requested under Freedom of Information on September 20, but the CIA has yet to either release them or explain the delay in even responding. Hence the lawsuit. This will bear watching in the coming months.

But the crucial takeaway is something that transcends the whole Covid case: freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry and freedom of information are vital to the processes by which governments are at least to some extent held accountable.

John Ratcliffe

The US has a vast and supposedly omniscient intelligence apparatus. What has held it back in getting to the bottom of this matter? In February, the FBI came out with the judgment that Covid probably began with a lab leak. The Energy Department, citing fresh intelligence, released the same assessment later that month.

Then, months later, a 10-page report issued by the federal government informed us that most of the intelligence agencies had concluded Covid was not caused by a lab leak. This included the CIA. How to square this with Ratcliffe’s unambiguous statement, based on source evidence? The lawsuit challenging the CIA goes to the heart of that question.

In just over a week’s time, on January 8-9, Anthony Fauci will appear before the House Covid subcommittee. This will be an opportunity for the congressional body to put direct questions to this man about his role in the secretive pursuit of gain-of-function research, the funding of such work in China by his and other American bodies, and the findings of the intelligence agencies. Pay attention. This is a process that does not happen in China.

Paul Monk is a former head of the China desk in the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the author of a dozen books, including Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.