Call it Wuhangate.
The scientific and circumstantial evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is close to dispositive. China’s coverup of key evidence on the origins and initial spread is indisputable.
But recently released documents showing the extent of America’s own connection to dangerous research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan raise the horrifying possibility that US taxpayer funding may have facilitated COVID’s creation — and that the US government is part of the coverup.
Getting to the bottom of this and holding China accountable ought to be President Joe Biden’s top priority — and he had an opportunity to do so this week at his virtual summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. But the White House’s summary of the meeting didn’t even mention COVID, suggesting the president avoided the explosive topic altogether.
In fact, the American people are the victims of at least three COVID coverups — and the time has come for accountability running from Wuhan to Washington, DC.
Coverup #1: The Chinese government has lied and hidden information about the novel coronavirus from the world from Day 1, destroying evidence, silencing whistleblowers and concealing the involvement of the People’s Liberation Army in the WIV’s coronavirus research. Beijing’s conduct throughout leaves little doubt that the lab was the true source of the virus — and that China is an adversary that plans to harness the power of biology to fight and win future wars.
Coverup #2: Our own National Institutes of Health and its funding intermediary EcoHealth Alliance also lied: It turns out they were funding highly questionable and risky gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV for years. (“Gain of function” refers to experiments that alter microorganisms to enhance certain aspects such as transmissibility or virulence.)
In fact, as is clear from recently released documents, salaries of several key scientists involved in the WIV’s unacknowledged biological-weapons-related research and development program for none other than China’s People’s Liberation Army were being supplemented with US taxpayer funds from the NIH, the Pentagon and the State Department — so the collective guilt goes beyond National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Anthony Fauci, though his support for allowing the feds to fund the dangerous research was critical.
Why, then, did Fauci claim on multiple occasions in testimony to Congress that the NIH has never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan? And why has the NIH failed to produce the grant records Congress requested?
In other words: Why did Fauci lie to Congress — repeatedly and knowingly?
It is by no means certain that US funding for research at the WIV produced COVID-19. But that all this was happening was damning enough that our public-health overlords decided to close ranks and double down on the Chinese Communist Party orthodoxy that the virus emerged from animal-to-human transmission, despite significant evidence to the contrary.
Coverup #3: In his pursuit of a reset with Xi, Biden — with the complicity of our intelligence community — is doing his best to bury any serious investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
It’s no coincidence Biden refused to answer a reporter’s question about whether he would demand answers from Xi at the summit. One of his first acts on assuming the presidency was to shut down the investigations into the origins of COVID-19 — including the one I led at the State Department in 2020, which presented troubling scientific and circumstantial evidence on the secret activities of the WIV that bolster the lab-leak theory.
In May 2021, when media interest in the lab-leak theory became impossible to ignore, Biden ordered a time-bound intelligence review of the origins question. This was a clear gambit to buy time and give the appearance of action on the issue. When the intelligence community essentially shrugged and said, “We’ll never know for sure,” the president was similarly phlegmatic and has shown zero interest in pursuing the issue further.
It’s clear that the administration sees a robust investigation into COVID’s origins as an impediment to its China reset and has basically become a party to the Chinese Communist coverup.
Beijing is getting away with global mass murder with the assent — and possibly the inadvertent collaboration — of our own government. It’s no surprise that a Communist dictatorship would show contempt for the truth; but the NIH’s resistance to cooperation and the ostrich-like posture of the Biden administration should worry each and every American. We need answers — now.
Read in The New York Post