The former leader of the State Department’s task force investigating the origins of COVID-19 not only believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but also that it was the result of bioweapons research.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” says David Asher. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”
This is an explosive charge, given the millions of deaths that have resulted from the coronavirus, not to mention the trillions of dollars in economic damages that have resulted from the lockdowns.
But a growing body of evidence suggests that Asher may be on to something. Here are some key points:
- China does have a bioweapons program: Beijing joined the Biological Weapons Convention in 1984 but later — like almost every other international treaty it has signed — began violating it.
Since 2007, Chinese government researchers have been writing publicly about developing bioweapons using controversial “gain of function” research to make the viruses more lethal.
In fact, the former president of China’s National Defense University wrote in his 2017 book “War’s New High Ground” that biotechnology will enable the development of — get this — “genetically engineered pathogens that target specific ethnicities.”
That same year, as Asher points out, China’s top state television commentator revealed that biowarfare, using viruses, was a new priority under Xi Jinping’s national security policy.
- The Wuhan lab was engaged in such bioweapons research: The US State Department under Mike Pompeo concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology — China’s most advanced lab — “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
The first “cluster of cases,” Asher reports, occurred among lab personnel in the fall of 2019. And Major General Chen Wei herself, the head of the People’s Liberation Army’s bioweapons research program, rushed down to Wuhan to deal with it. Why? It’s not unreasonable to think that it may have been one of Gen. Chen’s pathogens that had escaped from the lab. - The novel coronavirus did not come from nature: Over the past year, Beijing has told one story after another about the origin of the coronavirus. We’ve heard tales of bats and pangolins, caves and wet markets. The Chinese authorities have even blamed the US military for bringing the virus to Wuhan. Many Western scientists initially went along with the explanations offered by Chinese colleagues with whom they had close professional ties.
All of this spinning is intended to obscure the obvious: The China Virus has no analog in nature.
Chinese whistleblower Dr. Yan Li-Meng, who fled China last April, was the first to point out that the virus’ closest cousin is a bat coronavirus originally isolated by the People’s Liberation Army, but tinkered with to make it much more infectious. The lab-origin theory has received support from other scientists, including Dr. Steven Quay, who has taught at Stanford Medical School and concludes “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the virus did not come from nature but is “laboratory derived.”
How? It turns out that the coronavirus burrows its way into human cells using a special tool called a “furin cleavage site.”
A new scientific report shows that, of the 1,000 — one thousand! — coronaviruses in nature that most closely resemble the novel coronavirus that caused COVID-19, not a single one possesses a similar “furin cleavage site.”
That suggests that this special tool is not a product of natural evolution, but was inserted.
In the Wuhan lab.
Even the former director of the Centers for Disease Control Robert Redfield said on Friday he believes the coronavirus leaked from the lab, stating that the disease’s fast transmission doesn’t make “biological sense.”
Why is the laboratory origin of the coronavirus just now coming out? China has engaged in a massive coverup these past 15 months, and it has not been alone. Officials at the World Health Organization have consistently downplayed the possibility that it came from the lab.
A delegation of WHO scientists was finally allowed to visit Wuhan this past January, but they might as well have stayed home. As Jamie Metzl of the Washington-based think tank The Atlantic Council, later remarked, “Not only was it not a real investigation, it was more of a chaperoned two-week study tour where they were given highly curated information.”
Those on this side of the Pacific who were funding the Wuhan lab, like EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, were also eager to dismiss the lab-origin theory. (Daszak, curiously enough, was the only American on the WHO investigatory team.)
In other words, an awful lot of people have been acting as if they had something to hide.
In the law, this is called “consciousness of guilt.” This is like running out the back door of your house when the police show up at your front door. Or, in China’s case, locking down the lab, destroying evidence, and blaming innocent bats.
Such behavior should raise everyone’s suspicions.
Of course, none of the above constitutes absolute, ironclad, irrefutable proof that the coronavirus was a bioweapon under development at the Wuhan lab.
But it all certainly seems to point in that direction, doesn’t it?
Steven W. Mosher is the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s ‘Dream’ is the New Threat to World Order.”