Did you know that in the autumn of 2019, unbeknown to the rest of the world, a deadly pathogen leaked from a biological facility in China?
The pathogen wasn’t COVID-19. It was brucella, a type of bacteria, and the facility was located not in Wuhan but in Lanzhou, in the country’s northwest.
The similarities don’t end there. After infections were identified among workers at the facility in November 2019, it was shut down, but the pathogen had already spread through the wider community. As was later discovered, waste gas from the fermentation vats hadn’t been sanitized properly before it was discharged into the atmosphere. Over the course of the next year, more than 10,000 people in the area around the lab were infected with brucellosis. Although brucellosis tends to not be fatal today thanks to antibiotic treatments, it can cause nasty muscular problems that last for years. Once upon a time, it was responsible for significant numbers of deaths, especially in warmer climes.
Most of the infections were confined to the laboratories where they occurred. Eight researchers died.
Human error was the principal cause of the infections, such as wearing the wrong personal protective equipment or handling samples incorrectly. Spills, splashes, and even animal bites were also identified as causes.
Not all of the infections could be contained. As well as brucella, the deadly SARS virus was able to break out—or, rather, be broken out—of laboratories on at least two occasions, once in Singapore and a second time in Taiwan. In Singapore, a worker who reportedly had less than 30 minutes of training in proper biosafety protocols managed to become infected and expose 84 other people to the virus.
The vast majority of illnesses and leaks occurred in North America, Europe, and Asia, with the United States recording more than three-quarters of total infections.
But as shocking as these numbers might seem, they’re only “the tip of the iceberg,” according to the researchers, who note the lack of a standardized reporting system for leaks and infections, as well as obvious incentives to not report them at all. Science is always political, never more so than when things go wrong.
Unsurprisingly, a notable omission from the new report is COVID-19, whose origins remain a source of huge controversy. During the pandemic, the mere suggestion that the virus hadn’t simply jumped from animals to humans—the posthumous revenge of some unlucky critter at Wuhan’s dismal “wet market”—was enough to get ordinary people and experts alike banned from social media, fired, vilified, and ostracised by family, friends, colleagues, and the world’s press. How could we forget?
If we’ve forgotten, we should remind ourselves of this.
Now, though, with the pandemic receding from view and as social and political conditions change, the “lab-leak hypothesis” is finally being given a proper airing.
In December 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a new book called “The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race” in which he argued that COVID-19 was a bioweapon created using so-called gain-of-function research, with U.S. government funding and support. Gain of function is ostensibly used, Mr. Kennedy argued, to create vaccines for animal viruses that might one day become transmissible to humans. Note the conditional “might” there. In actual fact, gain of function is a perfect cover to engineer biological weapons by making sure those viruses do become transmissible to humans.
Mr. Kennedy detailed how after 9/11 made biosecurity a top priority of the U.S. government, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was effectively turned into an arm of the Department of Defense, with one Dr. Anthony Fauci at its head. During President Barack Obama’s second term, concern about the research being pursued under Dr. Fauci’s leadership led to a moratorium on gain of function in the United States, but this didn’t stop it from taking place. Dr. Fauci simply transferred the program overseas to places such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Mr. Kennedy goes on to show the coordinated effort that allegedly took place among governments, nongovernment organizations such as the World Health Organization, the media, and prestigious scientific journals to hide the laboratory origin of COVID-19 once the pandemic had begun. That effort is still underway now.
For many, this will all still reek of “conspiracy theory,” and it doesn’t help that Mr. Kennedy’s book is advertised as “[unveiling] a global conspiracy of epic proportion and lethal consequence.” The truth is, this was no conspiracy. Conspiracies are, by definition, hidden, and the conspiracists try to keep things that way. This is different. Much of the evidence for what happened with gain-of-function research in the United States and then at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been public and in wide circulation for years, including during the earliest days of the pandemic, when anonymous posters on internet forums seemed to have a much better grasp on events than the world’s governments or the mainstream media. The cover-up has taken place right in front of our eyes.
For the sake of all those whose lives were changed for the worse by COVID-19, the true origins of the virus must be established. Not only for those who died but for the children whose developments have been stunted, the small business owners whose livelihoods were destroyed, the sons and daughters who were denied those precious last moments with their fathers and mothers, and the people of all ages who now labor with the long-term effects of the virus or the side effects of the experimental vaccines they were coerced into taking without their full consent. The truth, however embarrassing for the U.S. government, the Chinese regime, or anybody else, must be brought into the light. This must never happen again.
“The gain-of-function research that you’re specifically referring to is modifications that are done of potential pandemic pathogens, right? What if we can develop a vaccine way before we ever have to see a new virus that’s going to be another Covid-19 virus? That would be a huge benefit.
“But if we’re going to do that kind of research, we have to make sure that the risks are absolutely minimized and always be mindful that the benefits justify the risks.”
As long as humans are involved in science, human error will be, too. But some errors are intrinsic to the practice of science, and others aren’t. Human hands may prove unsteady and break a piece of glassware or a needle may slip, but these are errors of a totally different kind from the error of taking a novel virus and engineering it to be infectious in humans when previously it wasn’t. The idea that this is protecting us from risk, instead of massively elevating it, rests on a circular logic even a child could see through.
