I Smell a Rat – I Mean a Rewired Bat: Inside the Dark Cave of COVID-19’s Origins

 “Extremely unlikely” – that’s what the WHO report released today calls the possibility of a lab leak as the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 3 million people worldwide and devastated the global economy. But that dark scenario is looming larger according to many scientific experts. By their own admission, the WHO team was largely blocked by Chinese  authorities and Secretary of State Antony Blinken even charged that the report was partly written by the Chinese government.

British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a New York-based project called EcoHealth Alliance, has emerged as a spokesman for the WHO team, batting away speculation that the plague originated in a high-security government lab in Wuhan as “conspiracy theory” and “political from the start.” And it’s true that the Trump administration so hopelessly politicized the “kung flu” pandemic that even the former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield’s fairly restrained comments yesterday about a possible Wuhan lab leak immediately caused a public uproar. But Daszak, whose group has funneled millions of dollars to dangerous virology research in Wuhan over the years, is also a highly suspect player in the coronavirus origin story. The arena is rife with conflicts of interest – and Daszak must be seen as one of the worst offenders.

Dr. Peter Daszak

If the COVID-19 nightmare does turn out to have begun with a leak from a lab, where a bat virus was engineered to go viral in the human population, there will be many villains. It was the Frankenstein syndrome at work – in the name of protecting the human race from a future pandemic that jumped from bats to people, scientists might have indeed caused the unthinkable. While many scientists have been warning for years against this laboratory hubris -- one called it “looking for a gas leak in the dark with a lit match” – others plunged ahead.

One of these is Shi Zhengli, director of virology research at one of the major Wuhan labs. The other is Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, the world’s other top expert on the genetic interplay between bat and human coronaviruses. Shi and Baric, who have collaborated since 2015, have received millions in funding from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health. Following 9/11, Fauci energetically took up the federal government’s crusade against “bioterrorism,” showering money on dangerous research projects like Shi’s and Baric’s – even though the only known bioterrorist in the U.S. was a Fort Detrick anthrax scientist who was intent on escalating fear along with his research budget – and who later killed himself.

Shi Zhengli

The U.S.-funded research on biochemical warfare and weaponized disease actually began mushrooming during the Cold War. Along with this proliferation of deadly research came scores of lab accidents and leaks. “By 1960, hundreds of American scientists and technicians had been hospitalized, victims of the diseases they were trying to weaponize,” wrote Nicholson Baker in a must-read, eye-popping investigation of COVID-19’s origins in the January 4 issue of New York magazine. Some researchers died horrible deaths.

Baker’s lengthy article has become an indispensable part of the coronavirus canon. He concludes his heavily researched feature with these ominous words: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.” Until there was one.

Dr Ralph Baric

The other article you must read to begin to understand this viral catastrophe that has changed everything on Earth is by Alison Young, an investigative reporter for USA Today. Young’s alarming March 22 report discloses the high-risk world of laboratory research at U.S. government facilities, where accidents and leaks are common occurrences.

 It is imperative that we learn from the COVID-19 apocalypse. Scientific inquiry is spinning out of control, and either we find rational ways to regulate it or the human race will become lab rats.