China’s stooges: the real Covid conspiracy The lab-leak theory is still being suppressed

This was a dynamite discovery. It showed that scientists in Wuhan with their long-standing US collaborators proposed to construct genetically modified coronaviruses. And hey presto — one year later, a novel Sars-related virus emerged suddenly in their city. It was either the most stunning coincidence — or a smoking gun. Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, was among those experts who saw this document and its drafts as the “blueprint for creating the virus that causes Covid-19”.

Yet still there is a cabal of scientists and media allies pushing the idea that the virus flared up in Wuhan’s bustling wet market. “We first believed the virus originated in the seafood market, but now it looks like that the market is just another victim. The virus existed [before the infections happened in the market],” said George Gao, head of China’s Centre for Disease Control, in May 2020.

Gao, an Oxford-educated virologist, later published a paper confirming that no animals tested positive from 1380 samples collected there in January 2020, adding that positive environmental samples they collected had been derived from infected humans, not animals. And even Baric – the world-leading expert who had warned US biosecurity chiefs that a lab leak might have caused the pandemic before WHO had declared a worldwide public health emergency, later told Congressional investigators that he believes the market was just “a conduit for expansion”.

But the theory keeps bouncing back like a bad penny. “Once you lose the market as the origin, all bets are off,” said Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, in private discussions among the Nature Medicine authors. Yet his colleague Eddie Holmes, a British biologist at the University of Sydney who had visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, said “no way” there could have been sufficient selective pressure to evolve a furin cleavage site there due to “too low a density of mammals” with small clusters of three or four animals kept in cages. As another of the team said, this begs the “million dollar question”at the core of the creation and spread of Sars-CoV-2.

First they blamed the pandemic on pangolins, then they turned the spotlight on raccoon dogs, which had been seen in the market by Holmes. Last year, there were excitable new headlines over a scrap of data obtained by Chinese researchers. ‘“Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic,” declared The Atlantic. “New data links Covid-19’s origins to raccoon dogs at Wuhan market,” reported The Guardian. “Have we found the ‘animal origin’ of Covid?” asked the BBC breathlessly.

“First they blamed the pandemic on pangolins, then they turned the spotlight on raccoon dogs.”

The answer turned out to be no. The presence of these critters in the market was so well known it was even mentioned by WHO during its negotiations with China for access. The new report simply showed again that raccoon dogs and other mammals susceptible to Sars-CoV-2 were sold in Wuhan before the market was shut down on 1 January 2020, while saying that positive swabs from the market also contained trace quantities of genetic material from raccoon dogs. “Now we have definite proof that animals were there that could carry coronaviruses at the time of the outbreak,” insisted Peter Daszak, whose organisation is now blocked from US federal funding after misleading officials over work in Wuhan. “It’s another piece of evidence that the market was where it began, not the lab.”

Then the Chinese researchers posted their own analysis of the data. It confirmed yet again the presence of raccoon dogs on sale in the market. “However, these environmental samples cannot prove that the animals were infected,” they wrote emphatically. “Furthermore, even if the animals were infected, our study does not rule out human-to-animal transmission, as the sampling was carried out after the human infection within the market. Thus, the possibility of potential introduction of the virus to the market through infected humans… cannot yet be ruled out.

Many experts believe a debunked idea is being pushed as a deliberate diversion. “The incessant fixation on the market by one group of virologists — to avoid having to admit the science was compromised from the beginning — is preventing any other scenarios from being properly examined lest you are labelled a conspiracy theorist,” said molecular biologist Sigrid Bratlie, a strategic adviser on biotech to Langsikt Policy Centre in Oslo who admits to being astounded by the scale of efforts to suppress the lab origin theory.

Astonishingly, there still remains no conclusive proof over how this virus exploded in Wuhan. Yet we do know Beijing’s dictatorship tried to cover-up the initial outbreak, and then blocked outside investigations of the origins. Scandalously, we have discovered this disturbing obfuscation over Covid’s origins was assisted by some of the most prominent figures in Western science. This was the real conspiracy — and it is still being pushed today by the Chinese Communist Party’s useful idiots.