The Shadow of Patient Zero

Behind the first victim of covid-19 is the scandal of the century. By failing to report it, the mainstream media became complicit.

In the light thrown by the known facts, the shadow falls the wrong way behind Patient Zero, the first victim of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that has been the death of 3 million people and a disaster for the world. Their identity remains a mystery. All that is known about them is that, sometime between September and November 2019, they walked the streets of Wuhan, a megacity that sprawls around a bend in the Yangtze in central China. The virus they carried, which causes the disease covid-19, originated in a tiny horseshoe bat.

That person’s footsteps, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) confidently said from the beginning, led out of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a “wet market” in the city centre. Initially plausible, this was known to be untrue by February 2020. It was in the detail of the first medical report by Chinese doctors on the original cohort of Wuhan patients. The first victims, both in the city and outside China, had “no epidemiological linkage to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market”.

The PRC, an authoritarian state of secrecy ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has since refused to hand over the raw data on those early victims. Even so, in May 2020 it quietly admitted the wet market was not the origin of the pandemic. For many months, the virus has been said to have simply emerged naturally from somewhere out there, somehow. Those who study zoonotic viruses — which jump from animal to human — have been warning that might happen for decades.

Yet while the first victim’s identity is unknown, their shadow can be clearly seen. If it is an illusion, it’s a confounding one. Falling clearly with the balance of probabilities, it has become more apparent with each new fact, compounding coincidence and strange anomaly brought to light by dissident scientists — notably the DRASTIC group, for whom Gilles Demaneuf is a strong voice, Yuri Deigin, Bret Weinstein, Alina Chan, Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson.

The basic facts are that SARS-CoV-2 emerged suddenly in a highly improbable place and form and left no natural trace of how it did so. Wuhan’s biological research facilities and their work explain the suddenness, resolve the improbabilities and contain the only known trace. Rather than a wet market or a wilderness, Patient Zero likely walked out of a Wuhan laboratory.

This is emphatically not an extraordinary claim. It is the most reasonable assessment of the known facts, as recently conceded by the World Health Organization (WHO). Its own hypothesis on how the virus entered Wuhan effectively is the lab origin hypothesis — just without the labs or the supporting evidence. That the WHO promotes its version as plausible while dismissing the far more plausible lab origin is both nonsensical and revealing.

The WHO is demonstrably in the political grip of the PRC, which has always dismissed a lab origin. Proof of that origin, or even the possibility of it, threatens the stability of China and the power of the CCP. These are what the PRC guards most dearly. Never an honest actor, the PRC has even denied natural outbreaks of pandemic viruses, most notably that of SARS in 2002.

Disturbingly, a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 has also been ridiculed by the scientific and media establishments in the West. Both have suggested that the idea simply reveals the ignorant masses cannot accept events of great moment can have mundane explanations. Yet what is being put forward is the most mundane of all explanations: human error.

The strong probability is that an accident occurred during dangerous research. The accident was not admitted because too much is invested in the research, and not merely by the CCP.

The Wuhan laboratories are part of a runaway global scientific program built to save the world from a global pandemic. It might have done so, if pursued at a small scale under strict control. It has however expanded beyond all scientific need and is now more likely than nature to produce the catastrophe it was meant to avert. SARS-CoV-2 is probably proof that this tragedy, long predicted within the scientific community, has already happened.

If that is confirmed, the immense scale, scope and freedom of operation that the program has acquired will likely be destroyed as a consequence. It is as existentially threatened by a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 as the CCP. Those involved are however relied upon to discern the origins of the virus.

Between 2014 and 2017, they ridiculed the chance of their work ever causing a pandemic through a laboratory accident. Their dismissal of informed scientific concern is on official record. So are the facts that the United States government allowed them to continue, and that the American taxpayer funded virus research in Wuhan. The circumstances within Wuhan — of pandemic viruses being stored and manipulated in the midst of millions of people — are also replicated throughout the world, particularly the US.

The mainstream media has failed to report any of this because, in an age of political narrative in which supposed moral “truths” matter and facts refuting them do not, it is fundamentally broken. Two greater disasters threaten as a consequence.

Since the beginning, the pandemic has been used to accelerate the scientific program that likely produced it. A growing number of laboratories contain a growing number of pandemic viruses, some of which do not exist in nature. Another pandemic resulting from a laboratory accident is becoming more likely, not less.

The other greater disaster of the pandemic may turn out to be the strong denial of its lab origin in the face of clearly contrary facts. Public trust in mainstream media is already near non-existent. Now it is at risk in science too. If SARS-CoV-2 is proven to have come out of a lab, that trust may be irreparably broken in the short term. The potential consequence — popular distrust of scientists and dismissal of scientific understanding — will be far more dangerous than the virus itself.

These too will be profoundly destructive global disasters. We are on the edge of both because those capable of controlling the narrative are convinced their self-interest is also the greater good. The same “massive error of judgement,” in the phrase of one scientist, likely produced the pandemic itself.

It is difficult to prove that SARS-CoV-2 entered the world because of a laboratory accident. It is however easy to show that the world has been misled on the probability of that origin, and by whom. That only gives the hypothesis even greater credibility.

“To them, the truth is a greater threat than the invisible murderer that they know is on the loose… I suspect this is going to catch up with us all.”

— Valery Legasov, Chief Investigator of the Chernobyl disaster

The scientific program to save the world from a pandemic virus was built over the last two decades, mainly by the United States. Its focus however is China, considered the likely source of future pandemics due to geography, demography and culture. The research effort of the two nations is connected by EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

EcoHealth plugs American taxpayer dollars into the socket of Chinese zoonotic virus research at the WIV. Through this connection, the institute’s work has been funded by USAID and the US Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services.

The WIV is also connected to advanced US expertise through EcoHealth. Knowledge in virus manipulation has been provided to Chinese researchers by the American scientist Ralph Baric, who runs a lab at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill.

A New York-based non-profit, EcoHealth claims the mission of “protecting global health by preventing the outbreak of emerging diseases”. It has funded research related to “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence” with US$12 million in the last ten years alone. Over a third of that money came, in 2018 and 2019, from the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency for “combating weapons of mass destruction”.

In the financial year ending 2019, EcoHealth received $18 million. Ninety percent of the money came from the US taxpayer. The organisation awarded $7 million in grants and took $6 million in salaries and compensation. The latter have increased by $2 million between 2015 and 2019, with 80 percent of that money going to senior management.

EcoHealth is run by the British scientist Peter Daszak, whose own compensation has risen more than $50,000 in two years. With a remuneration of over $410,000, he is as well-paid by the American taxpayer as Anthony Fauci, the highest-paid US federal employee.

Daszak is a key scientist in the WHO mission to find the origins of the virus. The conflict of interest goes unreported. Reuters even referred to him and the other members of the mission as “independent experts”. In February 2012, the WHO investigation concluded it was “extremely unlikely” the pandemic had been caused by a laboratory accident. Daszak placed “the origins of SARS-CoV-2,” as he always has, in “a market in Wuhan”.

As to how the virus got there, Daszak’s hypothesis is a “cold chain” of frozen food. It must have stretched to the city from where SARS-like coronaviruses are densely located, in subtropical areas a thousand kilometres and more to the south. The frozen food would have contained the virus until thawed. The effect would have been the immaculate appearance of the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 in a place that, all informed observers agree, it shouldn’t exist.

Proof of this hypothesis would be at least one other outbreak, prior to that in Wuhan, at the other end of the cold chain sometime in late 2019. None is known. Some however suspect there has been a previous outbreak of covid-19, in Yunnan province in 2012. The handful of victims definitely presented with the same symptoms as those of SARS-CoV-2, and at the same two-week period after exposure. The oldest among them died.

The bat coronavirus responsible was identified by the Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli. She named it RaTG13. Samples carrying the virus were carefully contained, in a solution at minus 80 degrees Celsius, and taken to Shi’s laboratory at the WIV, 2,000 kilometres away. That effectively is the cold chain hypothesis, only more plausible and with every stage a matter of record. Proponents call it the lab origin hypothesis.

“There is a clear indication of supply chains,” said Daszak in support of his contention, “that take you from places where SARS-CoV-2 relatives are, into the market.” The supply chain running the same route into Wuhan’s labs is established fact, not vaguely indicated, and it deliberately carried SARS-like viruses. Daszak funded it.

Yet while the lab origin hypothesis was dismissed by the WHO mission, it considers the cold chain a hot lead. It will lead nowhere, except to more funding for virus hunters like Shi and Daszak. Regardless, the focus of investigation, Daszak told the world, “could be shifted to South East Asia” and away from the Wuhan labs.

Wanted: mad geneticist with experience in recombinant DNA research, to form part of a team investigating new virus particles with a view to world domination. Salary will be on a profit-sharing basis; it is expected to be low at first, but rising within a year or two (dependent on satisfactory results) to around £10 million p.a., with annual increments thereafter as nation after nation capitulates to our demands…

— dark humour, Biological Sciences noticeboard, Aston University, 1978

Since 2017, Daszak has been pushing the Global Virome Project (GVP), of which he is Treasurer and Secretary. His pitch is for a staggering $3·4 billion “to start to discover the total diversity of risky viruses on the planet”. The justification is that this will “begin the end of the pandemic era”.

Daszak wants “countries to get behind it, governments to get behind it, the private sector to get behind it,” but the GVP has generated controversy within the scientific community. A paper in The Lancet in October 2019 asked, “Do we need a Global Virome Project?”

The world can’t afford not to “get behind” the GVP, according to Daszak. “Over the next 50 years,” he claimed in 2017, outbreaks of pandemic viruses would mean “three-and-a-half trillion dollars of cost”. The world’s “return on investment” on his project “would be a hundred to one,” he claimed.

If SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a laboratory, the $16 trillion the virus cost the world in a single year makes his argument ridiculous. If he is directly connected to the virus, his pitch to “end the pandemic era” for a hefty payday will come to nothing. His work will be proven far more dangerous than the threat he claims it can eliminate.

The Global Virome Project is EcoHealth Alliance writ large. EcoHealth in turn took its current form after the SARS epidemic of 2003. “SARS coronavirus emerged from a wildlife market,” as Daszak related in a 2019 interview. “We started to trace which species carried the virus into those markets. We found that it was bats. We started looking — where did they come from?”

The “we” was principally Daszak and Shi, the former connecting US government funding with the latter’s Chinese scientific team. They found the bats in southern China and extensively sampled the blood, saliva, urine and faeces of the animals over many years of “surveillance”.

“We’ve now found over a hundred new SARS-related coronaviruses,” Daszak stated proudly. “Some of them get into human cells in the lab.” By “the lab” he meant both Shi’s at the WIV and Baric’s at UNC.

“We’ve even found people with antibodies in Yunnan to SARS-related coronaviruses,” Daszak said, to show some viruses must have infected people in “spillover” events. He considers “there are dozens and dozens of small spillovers going on on the planet at any one time, which we just never see.”

That qualification undermines his entire lucrative project. Even if zoonotic jumps do happen with the frequency he claims, he admits they have no consequence. His claim is anyway unsupported by the data he cites.

In March 2020, Shi talked of the SARS-like antibodies she had discovered in those blood samples taken from Yunnan locals. “None of them had handled wildlife,” it was emphasised. They had just “seen bats flying in their village”. She was trying to make the same point as Daszak — that the mere presence of bats was enough for zoonotic jumps to happen.

The Yunnan locals were however the inhabitants of a single village Shi had pinpointed in a prime area for coronaviruses. The proportion of villagers in which the antibodies were found was just three percent. None of them had “reported SARS-like or other pneumonia-like symptoms”.

In other words, Shi established that spillover events happen in regions where dense bat populations carry coronaviruses, but relatively rarely and without consequence. Those infected do not even notice. Nor do they infect others. Shi has even conceded that “the majority of [coronaviruses] are harmless”.

That fact only makes the appearance of the very harmful SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan even more of an anomaly. The virus has other odd characteristics.

SARS as well as MERS and Hendra, two other dangerous bat viruses, all require amplification in intermediate hosts to infect humans. Even then, the ability to move between people is another difficult evolutionary trick for them to master. SARS had low human-to-human transmissibility, MERS and Hendra none at all.

In 2015, the Baric lab did find that a SARS-like coronavirus discovered by Shi could jump directly into humans. They however pointed out that, even if it did so, “it is still unclear whether it could spread from human to human”.

SARS-CoV-2 meanwhile moved from person to person with alacrity from the moment it entered the world — in a single district of central Wuhan. No intermediate host of the virus has been found.

“Now you could say,” Daszak said in 2019 of the “dozens and dozens” of SARS-related spillovers he baselessly supposed were continually happening, but that he admitted were anyway inconsequential, “who cares? And that’s one argument. But our strategy is any one of those could become pandemic.”

The use of “strategy” was perhaps telling. Daszak is keen on the hard sell of “dramatic languages about ‘threats’” to get the money he wants. “That’s a great sell,” he reckons. “We’re going to stop the next pandemic if you give us, I mean, you know, a couple of billion dollars.”

So far there are only two known results of Daszak’s work. Millions of American taxpayer dollars flowed through EcoHealth, with 60 cents of every one evaporating into salaries and expenses, and a hundred novel SARS-related viruses went into the WIV. A third result may well be SARS-CoV-2.

“…our contribution on the BSL‑4-level pathogens will benefit the world.”

— of WIV research, George Gao, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2017

On 3 February 2020, Shi revealed the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was 96 percent identical to one of the viruses she had discovered named RaTG13. A South Korean lab soon found a section of SARS-CoV-2 matched perfectly with BtCoV/4991, a published short sequence of another bat coronavirus discovered by Shi. The same section of RaTG13 was also identical.

This created confusion for five months. In July 2020, Shi finally confessed the BtCoV/4991 was a section of RaTG13. The nomenclature is just one of several attempts by Shi to mislead on the provenance of that virus.

She discovered RaTG13 in 2013, in “an abandoned mineshaft in Mojiang County, Yunnan Province”. The mineshaft was inhabited by a large population of horseshoe bats. In the spring of 2012, six men had fallen ill while working to clear bat guano from the mine.

Each man presented with symptoms of severe pneumonia two weeks after going into the mine. The period between first exposure and sickness is identical to SARS-CoV-2 victims. Aside from extreme difficulty in breathing, the men’s symptoms included a dry cough and sore limbs, headaches and high fever. “Anyone presenting with them today would immediately be assumed to have covid-19.”

Three of the men died. The likelihood of death was greater for the oldest victims and also proportional to time spent in the mine. This is again similar to victims of SARS-CoV-2, with age and viral load being factors in mortality.

Coming a decade after the SARS epidemic, the fatal disease outbreak triggered an immediate high-level response in China. Some of the victims were still hospitalised when a field team from the WIV went into the mineshaft to search for the cause of their illness. RaTG13 was subsequently isolated in the WIV from a sample of bat faeces.

Shi maintains the Mojiang mine workers died due to a fungal infection, not RaTG13. “If the mine had not been promptly shut,” she has however admitted, “it would only have been a matter of time before they caught the coronavirus”. This clearly indicates RaTG13 is readily infectious to humans.

Contemporary accounts of the Mojiang mine outbreak cast doubt on Shi’s claim RaTG13 was not responsible. At least three Chinese scientific teams searched the mineshaft for the cause. All were looking for viruses, indicating fungal pathogens were not considered responsible.

In 2014, one of these teams reported the discovery of a paramyxovirus in samples from rats within the mine. The scientists however found “no direct relationship between human infection” and that virus.

A doctor who treated the Mojiang mine victims however wrote a Master’s thesis on their illness. Published in May 2013, The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown viruses concluded that the cause was a novel SARS-like virus from horseshoe bats.

The thesis also noted a few leading specialists had been consulted when the men fell ill. Among them was Zhong Nanshan, the virologist who managed the China’s response to the SARS outbreak. His inclusion in discussions implies a SARS-like coronaviruses was suspected as the probable cause.

The WIV also specialises in bat coronaviruses and has no practical interest in fungal infections. It however sent four expeditions into the mine over the course of a year, between August 2012 and July 2013.

Both Shi and Daszak have claimed RaTG13 lay forgotten in the WIV until January 2020, when it was supposedly sequenced purely by chance. “We thought it’s interesting,” Daszak said, “but not high-risk. We didn’t do anything about it and put it in the freezer.”

In fact, RaTG13 is exactly the sort of SARS-like virus for which Shi and Daszak had spent a decade searching across China. One scientist has described it as their “Holy Grail”. Daszak possibly even referred to the virus directly in 2017. “One of these [discovered] viruses is very close to SARS,” he said that year.

Regardless, RaTG13 represented the rare first stage of a potentially dangerous pandemic virus. All it lacked was transmissibility between humans and it would have become another SARS. If Shi and Daszak really did dismiss the virus as “not high risk,” it is an admission of incompetence in the task for which they have received millions of dollars in funding.

Their claims have however been proven untrue. The database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) shows RaTG13 was repeatedly accessed by researchers at the WIV in 2017 and 2018.

The four percent difference between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 has been claimed to represent at least twenty years of evolution in the wild, although Shi herself shies away from such calculations. As Israeli scientists have recently shown with a mutant strain of SARS-CoV-2, however, it is possible to dramatically accelerate virus evolution in the lab.

The “perfect viral melting pots” for zoonotic viruses are not the wet markets or remote Yunnan caves to which Shi and Daszak point in justification of their work. They are biological research laboratories.

The four percent difference between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 is primarily in the spike protein. It is the biological mechanism that makes the latter virus so infectious to people, realising its pandemic potential.

“Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus zoonotic risk,” as Daszak explained in 2019. “You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. You can build the protein — and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this — insert it into backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab.”

Baric, “probably the foremost coronavirus biologist in the United States and one of the best in the world,” is Shi’s American counterpart and colleague. His UNC lab, as Daszak admitted, cooperates with hers at the WIV.

Work at the Baric laboratory is supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). NIAID, through EcoHealth, has awarded many research grants to Shi’s lab at the WIV. One grant in 2019 had the objective, as discovered by the scientists Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson in July 2020, “to evaluate by experiment the potential for pandemic pathogenicity of the novel bat coronaviruses they collected from the wild”.

The Director of NIAID is Fauci, the man as well-paid by the American taxpayer as Daszak. Fauci is also the leading scientist behind the US response to SARS-CoV-2. President Biden has described him as “one of the most distinguished and trusted voices in the world”.

In January 2021, a year after it was known that the wet market was not the origin of SARS-CoV-2, Fauci was asked whether it might be. He replied, “Oh, absolutely”.

“The biggest breach of ethics was the fact that both my company and NASA attempted to cover up what really happened. That was the bigger error. They had time to think about it and deceive people.”

— of the Challenger disaster, Roger Boisjoly, Morton Thiokol Engineer

The WIV is the world’s leading centre of research into SARS-like bat coronaviruses. The institute’s virus databases were altered and scrubbed on the night of 30 December 2019. It happened within hours of Shi being informed a novel coronavirus had caused a SARS-like outbreak in Wuhan. Shi herself admits to “frantically” going through those databases that night. The DRASTIC group has recently reported on the events in detail.

Shi’s own work has definitively established that SARS-related bat coronaviruses viruses are scarcely present in Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital. Unlike Yunnan, Hubei lacks the dense populations of bats and viruses that she, to considerable acclaim, has found are necessary to produce a virus like SARS (and, by inference, SARS-CoV-2).

“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan,” Shi has even frankly admitted. The coincidence of the outbreak happening in close proximity to the Wuhan labs was so improbable, she effectively conceded, that she initially “wondered if [the municipal health authorities] got it wrong”.

This brings into question the justification for Shi’s research with bat coronaviruses. She claims it will allow her to “predict virus hotspots and their cross-species transmission potential”. That the outbreak happened “in central China” at all shocked Shi. “Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals — particularly bats”.

Shi has even used Wuhan’s inhabitants as a scientific control in testing SARS-like antibody levels, because they “have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats”. The bat species in which SARS-CoV-2 originates, the Intermediate Horseshoe bat Rhinolophus affinis, is not even present in Hubei according to official Chinese surveys. The species was however present in the Mojiang mineshaft. It is the host of RaTG13.

The outbreak in Wuhan suggests Shi’s entire project is an abject failure, incapable of achieving its objective. Alternatively, if her understanding is accurate, it suggests a Wuhan laboratory is the likely origin of the outbreak.

Field research by Wuhan scientists is the only route bat coronaviruses have definitely taken from remote areas of subtropical China, where they are naturally concentrated, to Wuhan, where they don’t exist — other than by the hundred inside the city’s laboratories.

Scientists in those labs interact daily with both virus samples and the city’s population. Their research has unnaturally concentrated the viruses, and people potentially infected with them, in central Wuhan.

As Daszak freely admitted in 2019, Shi has evolved viruses into more infectious forms. One aspect of this so-called “gain-of-function” (GOF) work is “serial passaging”. A natural virus, or pieced together parts of different ones, are repeatedly sent through animal cells, hot-housing their evolution.

RaTG13 was not transmissible between humans. SARS-CoV-2 is meanwhile demonstrably missing the early part of its evolution. This was proven by “scientist turned detective” Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute, in May 2020.

Chan co-authored a scientific paper which compared SARS-CoV-2 and SARS. It showed how SARS had evolved rapidly on first jumping to humans, as expected, and how SARS-CoV-2 resembled its appearance after that evolution. “We’re missing the early phase,” she concluded. Evolution in the laboratory is the obvious explanation, one that is almost inescapable.

From the beginning, SARS-CoV-2 was highly stable in form and highly infectious to and between humans. If the virus first jumped to humans outside Wuhan, it should have produced at least one prior outbreak elsewhere in 2019. It didn’t. If the virus made the jump inside Wuhan, then it should have evolved rapidly to better infect humans. It didn’t do that either.

The work at the WIV explains this paradox, but scientists have refused to admit it. They puzzle “the riddle of the coronavirus,” but outright reject the hypothesis that solves it. They admit the need to find the origin of the virus, but deny it came from the most likely place.

“The last thing we need is for this to walk out of the lab on the bottom of someone’s shoe.”

— Contagion, 2011

As biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin extensively detailed in April 2020, there are many suggestions of a laboratory origin in SARS-CoV-2. Of particular note is the freak feature of a furin site, which provides the pathogenicity of the virus. Furin sites are rare in the beta lineage of coronaviruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs. There appears to be a natural selective pressure against them. None have been found in bat coronaviruses in the wild.

“It’s in there by an insertion,” claims Deigin. The furin site of SARS-CoV-2 gives every sign of being marked with a common technique of lab manipulation. “It’s two exact same codons,” he says of the markers, “very rare codons, in sequence.” The codons allow scientists to easily check if their inserted code remains intact. “If it was human made, it would all make total sense.”

Deigin’s expert work refutes “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a scientific paper published in the first moments of the pandemic by Nature, the world’s leading professional science journal. The paper incisively stated that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. This was widely reported as definitive by mainstream media. No journalist appears to have read the paper.

The paper’s authors didn’t support their conclusions in plain English, let alone scientifically. They soon relented on their introductory claim, saying it was only “improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation”. Eventually they contradicted themselves entirely and admitted “it is possible” that SARS-CoV-2 was evolved in a laboratory — by exactly the techniques practised at the WIV.

The “proximal origins” paper appeared in early March 2020, a month after the wet market was known to not be the origin of the virus. The Wuhan labs had been exposed as the only known presence of coronaviruses in the city. The Nature paper immediately allowed all speculation of a lab origin to be authoritatively reduced to conspiracy theory.

Another publication did likewise almost simultaneously. Scientific American, the world’s leading popular science magazine, published a profile of Shi Zhengli and her work. “How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus” uncritically portrayed Shi as a scientific heroine for our time. The article passed over many jarring facts with a smooth suspension of disbelief.

Despite conspicuous omissions, the article unwittingly made the case that scientific research in Wuhan likely caused the pandemic. It emphasised that the outbreak completely contradicted Shi’s expert understanding, historic precedent and even SARS-CoV-2 itself. Yet the conclusion was that the possibility of a lab origin was “tenuous”.

The article, written by a Chinese freelancer in Beijing, was clearly a puff piece. The journalist refused to add up the sum of knowledge she set down. Instead, she expediently took Shi at her word that the pandemic had nothing to do with her research. Obvious PRC propaganda, Scientific American published it as objective journalism.

The magazine has since called the lab origin a “most insidious falsehood”. The proximity of the Wuhan laboratories is dismissed as mere coincidence, one supposedly irresistible to ignorant conspiracy theorists. The opposite is true. Only ignorance can sustain the idea of coincidence.

The missing early phase of SARS-CoV-2 goes beyond what Chan discovered. It is almost the whole story. Those involved want it to stay missing. While trying to save the world from a catastrophic pandemic, they likely caused one. They have knowingly run the risk of doing so for decades, but it gained them so much they denied such a disaster could ever happen.

This remains true whether or not SARS-CoV-2 entered the world through a laboratory accident. If that origin is proven, however, it will be undeniably true. That will threaten careers, reputations and billions of dollars in past and future investment. It will also directly implicate the governments of China, France and the United States.

“Engineers got put into a position to prove that it would fail… Now that’s a totally different question than prove that it’s safe. They could not prove that it would fail.”

— of the Challenger disaster, Allan McDonald, Morton Thiokol Engineer

In the 2015 film The Big Short, the cause of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis is summed up as, “a good idea turned into an atomic bomb of fraud and stupidity that’s on its way to decimating the world”. The phrase could as well be applied to zoonotic virus research since 2003. One critical scientist even described the science as a “biological bomb” in 2013. His warning memo was removed from the United Nations website sometime in late 2020.

The bomb was assembled on the global shock and fear produced by the SARS epidemic in 2003. Although the concern is genuine, the extreme policy and public reaction appear to have been produced deliberately.

Daszak, for example, has openly spoken of how those seeking funding for virus research have “got to make this stuff more urgent, more directly applicable to people in the richer countries that are funding it, that need to fund it”. It comes down to “speaking more dramatic languages about ‘threats’. We talk about global health security. I mean, that’s a great sell.”

Experts said the SARS virus was a “warning shot” from nature; “we were lucky this time”. The threat “prompted unequivocal action from governments”. The world was “teetering on the edge of a pandemic,” but zoonotic science might prevent the catastrophe if given the chance.

The science is at the cutting edge of biotechnology, with the ability to strip viruses down to their genes and understand them, even remake them, at that level. The science is also inherently ‘dual-use,’ meaning capable of both beneficial or harmful application. Regardless, it claimed it could save the world from disaster.

The United States flooded funding into zoonotic science and it rapidly inflated in scale. This prompted other nations to do likewise, not least China. The science and its laboratories became “a mark of national sophistication,” pursued out of all proportion to scientific need. It was done with public money, without public consultation and at immense public risk.

The science handles the very danger it seeks to control. Each lab contains a potential pandemic many times over. Such biosafety laboratories are complex systems, designed to prevent catastrophic failure but subject to it by their nature. The risk of producing the disaster it seeks to avert is in the science at any scale. It was now being vastly, willfully and negligently magnified.

Field teams determinedly hunted zoonotic viruses in remote wildernesses, increasing the number and variety stored in laboratories by many hundreds. Often portrayed as a scientific “great game” with nature, the hunt was largely sustained by the $200 million PREDICT program of USAID.

This is the funding Daszak and EcoHealth plugged into Shi’s field work in China. The most prized finds of PREDICT were China’s SARS-like viruses, which Shi hunted, but the program was a response to the H5N1 avian influenza virus.

H5N1 had given another scare to the world in 2005, with the United Nations warning the virus could kill 150 million people — if it became transmissible between humans. Some scientists argued it could become so. In 2011, they answered this “important scientific question” by making it transmissible between mammals. That turned it into “one of the most dangerous viruses you can make”. The virus was then made infectious via inhalation.

Such gain-of-function research, by which scientists in the lab make the viral monsters they fear to meet in the wild, is common. Shi’s lab at the WIV, mentored by Baric’s in North Carolina, applies it to coronaviruses. Some scientists have called the work “morally and ethically wrong”.

By 2013, the laboratories capable of such work had trebled in a decade in America alone. The expansion was so dramatic, the US government didn’t even know how many labs it operated by 2009. The General Accounting Office described this as “problematic”. In 2014, the Scientist’s Working Group on Chemical and Biologic Weapons warned a “self-fulfilling prophecy” pandemic was likely to come out of a laboratory.

Concerns about the danger were so great that a faction within the US scientific community forced an official debate. The public, supplying the funds for the research and running the risks it produced, took no part. Microbiologist David Relman called it “unethical to place so many members of the public at risk and then consult only scientists — or, even worse, just a small subset of scientists”.

That small subset of scientists largely denied there was any risk in their work. To admit it would stop the immense rewards that were now flowing to them so easily: the laboratories, the research grants and the freedom to experiment. Avoiding that fate for themselves was their most powerful motivation, not reducing the danger their work presented to the world.

The most telling exchange occurred during a National Research Council symposium in 2014. Existing data on lab accidents predicted “a 5% to 27% probability of a pandemic over a 10-year period”. Ron Fouchier, lead scientist behind the “most dangerous” H5N1 mutant, rejected the odds outright.

“I prefer no numbers,” he said, “rather than ridiculous numbers that make no sense.” Disregarding his own opinion, Fouchier then “estimated that a lab-induced pandemic would occur every 33 billion years — more than twice the known age of the universe”.

The exchange echoed the physicist Richard Feynman’s experience during his investigation of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He found that NASA management considered the chance of losing a shuttle to be 1 in 100,000. Engineers estimated it to be 1 in 100. Actual experience proved it to be 1 in 60.

In January 2017, the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity nonetheless recommended zoonotic science continue its activities unchecked. The same year, WIV scientists appear to have begun work on RaTG13.

Scientists are human, politicians more so. In the name of saving the modern world they effectively built a bomb that could destroy it. Like the Global Financial Crisis, it was built unintentionally. None of those involved wanted the result to explode in their faces, but they knew it might. It probably did — in Wuhan.

That they refuse to admit this reality may lack integrity, but is also human. “I’m struck by the extent to which all the fingers point away from themselves,” said Phil Agelides of those who came before the US inquiry into the Financial Crisis. “I’m struck by the extent to which so many people on Wall Street somehow do not draw a correlation between the actions and activities and the risks they were undertaking, and the crisis that occurred.”

“…we were moving towards an event on a planetary scale… I had that sense of anger that there were no solutions, no technical remedies worked out in advance. Of course, we had said such an accident could only happen once in a thousand years…”

— of the Chernobyl disaster, Valery Legasov

Like virus research in recent decades, the promise of nuclear energy overwhelmed scientists and politicians in the 1960s. “No other fuel,” said Anatoly Alexandrov, the leading physicist behind Soviet nuclear power, “can see humanity through even the next thousand years.” A nuclear-powered world, said his American counterpart Alvin Weinberg, “would in effect have solved the energy problem forever”. Both statements are true.

“Energy too cheap to meter,” just like the pan-coronavirus vaccine that zoonotic science now considers possible, would be a Promethean gift to humanity. In the 1960s, to bring nuclear power online quickly, early reactors were scaled up into massive powerplants. The risk was considered negligible compared to the benefit.

Like biosafety laboratories, nuclear powerplants are containment systems for dangerous matter. They cannot become nuclear bombs, but early generation reactor cores must be cooled in an emergency shutdown. The heat in the fuel rods otherwise melts them down into a liquid mass that, if it escapes, will release a deadly flood of radiation into the world.

In the sixties, the public was told safety systems would prevent that meltdown disaster. Scientists on the US Advisory Committee of Reactor Safeguards soon realised that wasn’t true. In 1970, they drafted a letter to Glenn Seaborg, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), saying future reactors would have to be redesigned.

Official correspondence to the AEC had to be made public by law. Seaborg asked for the letter to not be published. “The public might misunderstand,” he said, “and the impact on the [nuclear power] industry might be serious.”

The following year, safety systems failed to prevent a simulated meltdown during model tests. The failure was dismissed by the nuclear industry and the AEC. They simply said the full-sized systems would work successfully.

“I think what happened,” said Robert Pollard, an AEC reactor engineer at the time, “was the federal government and nuclear industry decided that the absence of proof of danger was almost as good as proof of safety.”

The public, benefitting from nuclear power but also running the risk of a meltdown, were not informed. Pollard recalled his colleagues didn’t even consider telling them. “Disclose to them we were wrong? And the fact that, all these safety systems we told you about, actually, they might not do any good? My goodness, the uproar!”

“We all probably would have been fired. That would have been the end of this wonderful technology, from the stand-point of us [nuclear scientists]. And we just couldn’t admit that we had been wrong.”

In the Soviet Union, some nuclear scientists had more integrity. Yurii Koryakin, head scientist at the Institute of Power Research, had serious concerns about how quickly, and badly, Soviet nuclear plants were being built. “In the headlong rush,” he said later, “all sense of proportion was lost.” Other scientists shared his concerns. “Our efforts to solve this problem internally failed completely, so we went public.”

With great courage, Koryakin and his colleagues publicly questioned the safety of the Soviet nuclear power program. Alexandrov responded by calling their concerns “a pack of lies”. The program continued without change. “The scientific mafia led by Alexandrov was firmly in the saddle,” Koryakin recalled. “Ordinary engineers like us got kicked in the teeth.”

A reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear powerplant melted down in 1986, ironically when testing a safety system. A hundred people were killed by radiation or blast (after steam and possibly hydrogen explosions). The long-term health of several thousand others around the world was probably affected. The toll is trivial, statistically, when compared to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

The meltdown was partly due to negligent operation. A microcosm of Koraykin’s battle with Alexandrov played out in the control room. The man in charge was highly skilled but domineering and arrogant. Believing he couldn’t go wrong, he disregarded risk even when all data indicated imminent disaster. Subordinates pointed out the danger, but, with their jobs at stake, were made to shut up and go along.

The accident’s other primary cause was that the reactor was fundamentally flawed. It had been designed by Alexandrov. A further contributing factor was that lessons could not be learned in the Soviet Union. Even those who operated nuclear powerplants weren’t told of previous accidents, even at the same plant.

The Chernobyl event couldn’t have happened in the West, but a partial meltdown had occurred at Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania, nine years before. It was due to a cascade of minor failures, human error and design that was poor only in hindsight to the specific accident. This is typical of catastrophic failures in complex systems like nuclear powerplants (or biosafety labs).

The most harm done to anybody was a single x-ray’s worth of radiation, but the consequences were immense. The accident produced a massive popular reaction against nuclear power, and even against science in general. Politicians went with it. Nuclear power (now, after lessons learned, the safest, cleanest form of energy known) has been severely constricted by regulation ever since.

The deep history of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic probably mirrors this one of nuclear power. A promising science; the headlong rush; the lost sense of proportion; the idea “absence of proof of danger was almost as good as proof of safety;” the inability of those involved to admit being wrong; the bullying by a “scientific mafia”. This is all on record. The only elements missing, possibly, are disaster and denial.

If those are proven to be present in SARS-CoV-2, the same negative public reaction can be expected, only vastly magnified. Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, considers a lab origin “would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom”.

“We recognised that there was a risk,” Weinberg later reflected of the initial rush for nuclear powerplants, “but we always deemed the risk to be really acceptable. But now, I guess I’m more mature, older. I realise that the decision of what is acceptable is not something that we technologists can make. It’s something the public makes.”

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

— Richard Feynman, Minority Report on the Challenger Disaster, 1986

There is a pattern to disasters like the Global Financial Crisis, the Challenger going up and Chernobyl melting down. Catastrophic risk for all is involved in what a few are doing and is compounded to an extreme by the way they do it. The pattern of activity however rewards those few. Rather than lose the reward, they deny the risk in order to continue. When the predictable catastrophe occurs, it threatens the same self-interest and reveals them responsible. They deny the catastrophe even happened.

This is a pattern of human failure. It is likely behind the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The scientific method eliminates human error from the technical result, not those who practice it. Scientists are as susceptible to self-interest as anyone else.

“We’re talking about people,” says Bret Weinstein of the scientists relied on to discern the origins of SARS-CoV-2, “hovering between two interpretations of what has happened. If this is a natural virus, they were prophetic. If this is a lab leak, it’s a massive error in judgement.” He considers the entire scientific establishment “rushed to consensus” on the former view “based on either being the villains in a story or the heroes”.

With British science journalist Matt Ridley, Weinstein is among the most prominent voices for the lab origin hypothesis. An evolutionary biologist become popular commentator on science, politics and culture, he has a long history of making principled stands against the crowd at personal cost.

It is public record that his stand on the lab origin was built on a growing body of information. He first heard of the virus after emerging from the Amazon in early February 2020. “I’m a bat biologist, and I saw, okay: there’s a wet market; people are eating bats; this is a bat-borne coronavirus. The story looked very straightforward.”

Weinstein tweeted as much to his then 300,000 followers. They immediately pointed out the proximity of the Wuhan labs and their virus research. The information threw him. He quickly adjusted his position. “The virus likely comes from bats,” he tweeted. “That much is true. The bushmeat trade is dangerous — also true. Those things may well be unrelated in this case.”

On this scientific position, Weinstein considered the building evidence and decided by May that they likely were unrelated. He estimates the probability of a lab leak at around 90 percent. “I don’t want to be right,” he has often said since, recognising the magnitude of his conclusion (Deigin has the same lament). The facts don’t change.

The stance taken on the virus by the scientific community probably is, as Weinstein surmises, a reaction against vilification. Science, for all its human mistakes, has done vastly more benefit than harm to humanity. While those manifest benefits go unnoticed, the power of science to understand nature make its harms more obvious and frightening.

For scientists, the lab origin hypothesis perhaps too closely echoes the Frankenstein story that has dogged them for two centuries. The mutant viruses of zoonotic research are even called “chimeric” after the mythical hybrid monster, because they stitch together parts of different gene sequences.

Yet it is on record that the scientific community itself was concerned that virus researchers, thrilled with the power to create such monsters, were doing so because they could and dismissing any thought of whether they should. There was a real risk of their creations escaping their control to terrorise the world. If the public sees Dr. Frankenstein in the work of zoonotic science, it is because the story is there.

The categoric denials of a lab origin by experts also carry the echo of Frankenstein. They might all be summarised by the first line of Shelley’s novel. “You will rejoice to hear,” it goes, “that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”

For zoonotic science, however, there is more at stake than just vilification. If SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a laboratory, the scientific program in which those involved are entirely invested will be largely dismantled. For many it will mean the end of their careers, their research and, for some, their reputations. They will have brought science as a whole into public distrust. This is true of Daszak and Shi in particular.

Speculatively, in the minds of those involved in zoonotic science, a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 would be an aberration even if it is true. They never meant for it to happen. It must be denied lest the public conclude it was not an aberration, but rather a predictable disaster caused by greed, arrogance and negligence. That conclusion, however, would be accurate and irrefutable.

Humanity, and especially modern global human society, is undeniably threatened by zoonotic viruses. Our vulnerability can only be reduced by increasing our knowledge of them. Both the knowledge and the process of acquiring it are however threatening too. Managing the balance requires extreme caution. Since the SARS outbreak, none has been shown.

The risk of a pandemic produced by a laboratory accident is now far greater than one emerging from nature. The scientific community has known this to be true for a decade.

Zoonotic science must be made to confront its “massive error of judgement”. Even if SARS-CoV-2 didn’t come out of a laboratory, the next pandemic virus probably will. That future disaster is only becoming more certain. From the beginning, and unforgivably, the pandemic has been used to justify the acceleration of the same scientific program that likely produced it.

“The best way forward is prevention,” Daszak said in March 2020 of confronting the pandemic threat. That is undeniable, but Scientific American reported it would involve “rolling out what researchers such as Daszak and Shi have been doing on a much bigger scale”.

“…a few outsiders and weirdos saw what no one else could… saw the giant lie… They saw it by doing something the rest of the suckers never thought to do: They looked.”

— of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, The Big Short, 2015

In the Soviet Union of the 1970s, where official claims contradicted reality but had to be accepted by ordinary people, the dissident Strugatsky brothers wrote Roadside Picnic. The focus of the classic science fiction novella is “the Zone,” a metaphor of such maddening narrative control. Reality shifts moment to moment and the laws of causality do not apply. Objects in plain sight vanish only to reappear somewhere else. Shadows fall the wrong way.

Disturbingly, the public has been subjected to a similar experience for a year regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2. That the virus emerged naturally cannot entirely be ruled out, but it is highly improbable. That it was released by a laboratory accident is the most reasonable, scientific hypothesis. It is therefore unreasonable and unscientific to reject the lab origin as “conspiracy theory,” but that is what has happened.

That wasn’t achieved by dissembling scientists, but by the mainstream media. Journalists simply ignored a trail of evidence and lies, contradictions and conflicts of interest that they should have relentlessly followed. Instead, the lab origin hypothesis was deliberately conflated with the virus being a bioweapon, categorised with the plethora of unscientific stories about SARS-CoV-2, labelled as Sinophobia, outright racism or simple ignorance.

If the media had acted to inform the public, then the information related above — all of it relevant to assessing the real nature of events and the honesty of the actors involved — would be common knowledge. It is not.

If journalists had followed the lab origin hypothesis, they would have uncovered the scandal of the century: the reckless endangerment of the entire world by a runaway global scientific program. Instead, they became part of that scandal as its willing mouthpiece.

The mainstream media completely failed to make clear the factual nature of events and hold to account those who lied about them. This is exactly the error-correcting role it is meant to perform in a free society. The pandemic has revealed that it has instead adopted a patrician role in managing the masses.

The truth is no longer something to be uncovered, as the opinion writer Bari Weiss noted in her 2020 resignation from The New York Times, “but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else”.

Like the scientific establishment also trying to control the narrative, the media apparently considers the facts of the pandemic go the wrong way for public consumption. People may reach the “wrong” conclusions, which are in fact the accurate conclusions, and so must be told what to think instead.

The “correct” view is that deadly pandemics result from human overpopulation encroaching upon nature, and from people mistreating animals, not from scientific research. It is wet markets that must be shut down, not laboratories. Science is to be “followed” and “believed,” not questioned. Two things can however be true at once, and the premise of science is to question everything, especially itself. Its refusal to do so in this case is conspicuous.

The media is also convinced of a dominant cultural attitude that the West must judge itself harshly, but has no right to judge others at all. Referring to the virus by its place of origin, for example, was quickly condemned.

The Hendra virus, a bat virus with a 60 percent human mortality rate, is officially named after the Brisbane suburb in which it emerged in 1994. Both the scientific and mass media initially referred to the “Wuhan” or “Chinese” virus, a clear, obvious and traditional shorthand descriptor.

Within weeks it was considered “wrong to refer to the virus as Chinese,” despite it originating in China. This was “tricky politics” willingly invoked into racism by the media and quickly exploited by the PRC. The matter was so pressing to the new Biden administration that, within its first week, it issued “an executive order banning the use of terms such as ‘China virus’ and ‘Wuhan virus’ when referring to COVID-19” (which is the disease, not the virus).

The lab origin hypothesis suffered in the same way, effectively proscribed by voices of authority. But it is built up from the facts of people’s actions, not the idiosyncrasies of their genes. Even if all involved were Chinese, that would remain irrelevant. The fact is, however, the problem made apparent by the WIV is a global one.

Had SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in the West in similar circumstances as it did in China, the media would not have accepted any denial of a lab accident. The stark reality is that a similar accident could happen in the West, where the majority of laboratories are located, tomorrow.

The Baric lab in North Carolina has its own disturbing record of close calls with dangerous pathogens. Revelations of other US lab accidents read “like a screenplay for a disaster movie,” said one headline in 2016. That the disaster probably played out in China was predictable, but ultimately happenstance.

The global pandemic is likely the result of human error at both the small and grand scale. The proximate cause may have been the mistake of a single lab worker, but behind it was an entire field of science and at least three governments. They all ineptly managed public money and public risk for their own self interest. The fault accrues to them. The Chinese people are not to blame, nor the American people. Neither were informed let alone consulted.

It is the US government, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, that allowed a valuable but dangerous science to run out of control. The American taxpayer may even have funded, at least in part, the discovery of RaTG13 and the creation of SARS-CoV-2 (if it is the creation it gives every appearance of being).

The WIV itself was meanwhile built by the French government after it was economically strong-armed and conned by the PRC. The project went ahead the objections of the US, the European Union and France’s own intelligence service.

Zoonotic research must continue, but the scientific community itself has long pushed for much smaller scale and far greater control. Those involved have avoided that push with absurd arguments. They are doing so again with denials that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of a lab accident. Worse, they are trying to expand and accelerate their program. Their reckless self-interest has been allowed to continue unchecked by the media.

Both the CCP and zoonotic science are now trying to ride out the pandemic’s storm with as little damage as possible. As with the “Russian flu” of 1977, in time it will probably be widely accepted that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from an accident in a Chinese laboratory. It will however remain officially denied, no lessons will be learned, and a similar but worse disaster will only become increasingly likely.

The facts suggest that Patient Zero, unknowingly infected with a dangerous virus that could lay ruin to the world, walked out of a Wuhan laboratory. Casting their shadow against the facts is only increasing the chance of it happening again.

THE SHADOW OF PATIENT ZERO