Covid-19 conspirator Robert Kadlec warns lab leak could spark another pandemic

Former US Department of Health official Robert Kadlec also reveals he lies awake at night agonising about the chain of events he and Anthony Fauci set in motion.

The former assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the US Department of Health, Robert Kadlec, says he lies awake at night agonising at the chain of events he and Anthony Fauci had set in motion. Picture: Reuters

The US health official who conspired with Anthony Fauci to downplay suggestions that Covid-19 leaked from a Wuhan laboratory says another pandemic could emerge from high-risk experiments in laboratories globally, saying the lessons from Covid-19 have not been learnt.

The former assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the US Department of Health, Robert Kadlec, has also revealed to Sky News that he lies awake at night agonising at the chain of events he and Dr Fauci had set in motion.

Dr Kadlec, who worked for presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump and led American efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, said his intention in initially downplaying a lab leak was to encourage co-operation from China in the early days of the outbreak.

The public denial of the lab leak theory spiralled, however, and the proposition Covid may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology turned into a conspiracy.

“I wake up at usually about 2am or 3am and think about it honestly, because it’s something that we all played a role in,” Dr Kadlec said.

In his first television interview to air on Sky News on Tuesday night, Dr Kadlec said the failure of governments to accept the risk­iness of virus research and its role in the last pandemic was hindering necessary steps to prevent a future lab outbreak.

“The trajectory of biolife sciences is such that these tools are out there and we could see something like this or worse,” he says in the Sky News documentary “What Really Happened in Wuhan, the Next Chapter”.

“The tools of science to do this kind of synthetic biology, this risky research, has not been limited to China. It happens in the US. It’s happening in a lot of places in the world and we could have another one of these (pandemics) if we don’t accept that.

“We know that in the past it could happen in an animal wet market, but we need to understand now it could happen in a lab … that requires a whole different set of considerations around the training of laboratorians, the construction of laboratories, the practices that are used, both in terms of how scientific experiments are performed (and how) research is performed generally.”

Former US State Department official Thomas DiNanno, who was a leading investigator into the causes of Covid-19, also told Sky News that the failure to learn from Wuhan threatened another crisis. 

“The problem with all of this is … we’ve made no meaningful changes to prevent it from happening again, either a zoonosis or a lab leak. This debate has stifled any debate for us to make meaningful changes.

“There’ve been no meaningful public policy changes because the US government and the national security establishment, the public health establishment, has decided that they don’t want to deal with this potential scenario.

“As a result, we’re just as vulnerable now as we were three years ago to a pandemic.”

Scientist Justin Kinney from Cold Harbour Laboratory.

Robert Kadlec.

Scientist Justin Kinney from Cold Harbour Laboratory said there was a widespread reluctance within the US and global scientific community to hold themselves accountable. “The Covid-19 pandemic spurred an unprecedented mobilisation in the scientific community to understand how the virus works and to create vaccines in new disease treatments,” Mr Kinney said.

“But there has been no similar effort in the scientific community to examine the role that they themselves might have played in starting the pandemic.

“People just want to ignore that possibility. And by and large, the scientific community has been ignoring that possibility.”

Dr Kadlec felt that Dr Fauci had other reasons for wanting to divert attention away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

He said Dr Fauci was likely worried about his reputation if it eventuated that his agency had funded the gain-of-function research that sparked the outbreak.

“That would be a natural re­action of him, or anybody, particularly I think, for him saying, what could this do to me and to our institute as a consequence if we were found to have some culpability or some involvement in this?”

US agencies, including Dr Fauci’s, were funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology via a not-for-profit organisation, EcoHealth Alliance.

Asked if he was fronting the cameras to seek forgiveness, Dr Kadlec said he felt a duty to tell the public about the discussions that had unfolded behind closed doors at the highest levels of the US ­government. “I just feel like it is an obligation that I have to say what happened. And I think to factually try to portray this, not to get sympathy or forgiveness, but more to say factually, here’s what happened. This is what we tried to do. Did it work? No. In fact, the thing you regret is that the downstream effects were things that we could not control,” he said.

The downstream effects included scientists publicly insisting a lab leak was a conspiracy while privately conceding that it was a possibility.

Private emails and slack mes­sages released earlier this year reveal that the group of scientists assembled by Dr Fauci privately felt it was impossible to distinguish from the genetic sequence of the virus itself whether it was natural or genetically engineered.

But the public was led to believe there was overwhelming evidence pointing to the zoonotic origin of Covid-19.

Dr Kadlec has now dedicated more than 18 months to examining how the pandemic began, exploring both the natural origin hypothesis and the laboratory leak.

As a result of his extensive investigation, his believes he has “come close” to the truth.

Dr Kadlec points to the risky vaccine research on live animals conducted by Chinese military scientist Zhou Yusen, who was ­creating a vaccine for Covid-19 in October 2019.

Zhou Yusen died around May 2020, three months after he lodged his patent for the Covid vaccine on February 24, 2020, as Sky News first revealed two years ago in a world exclusive.

“It looked like he was censored as a consequence of whatever happened,” Dr Kadlec said.

“Our evidence would suggest that something happened while he was doing his work, which we believe was when the virus first emerged.

“And whether he was held accountable either through some formal proceeding or not, he was certainly dead by July (2020).”

Asked if it were possible he had been killed for starting the pandemic, Dr Kadlec said: “It’s certainly possible.”

“We considered that as a plausible possibility, however, we had no evidence to make that assessment,” he said.

Sharri Markson is a Sky News host whose documentary What Really Happened in Wuhan: the Next Chapter will air tonight at 8pm on Sky News