According to confidential files seen by the Sunday Times Insight team, Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens at the Wuhan Institute of Virology shortly before the pandemic broke out. Here’s how the report in today’s paper begins:
Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began.
Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the COVID-19 outbreak.
The U.S. investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.
The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the U.S. State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant U.S. inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science. Researchers who have attempted to find conclusive proof have been hampered by China’s lack of transparency.
However, our new investigation paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory.
The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the SARS virus in 2003, attracted U.S. government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.
The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.
This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to SARS.
Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of COVID-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.
They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a U.S. investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”
According to the U.S. investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.
They believe this led to the creation of the COVID-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the COVID-19 pandemic,” one of the investigators said.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Mail has a non-paywalled summary of the story here.
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