Six years after a contagion that killed millions and wrecked the global economy, one of the great unanswered questions of Covid is, how did it begin? Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans reject what in 2020 was more or less the official (but outlandish) story: namely, that the novel coronavirus sprang from a wet market in Wuhan, China, and somehow jumped from bats — or pangolins? — to humans. 

This zoonotic theory of Covid’s origins still enjoys the backing of some scientists, but it is bedeviled by questions proponents can’t seem to shake off. For one thing, what was the intermediate animal that supposedly facilitated transmission? Who was Patient Zero? And how was it that the epicenter of the pandemic just happened to be located in Wuhan — one of a few virology labs in China authorized for research on dangerous coronaviruses?

That latter question points to a different hypothesis for Covid’s origins: that it resulted from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers had been conducting cutting edge “gain-of-function” research, combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids for the purpose of better understanding future infectious diseases. The lab-leak theory has been endorsed by at least one agency in the US Intelligence Community — the CIA.

Yet Americans and the wider world may never know the full truth unless these questions are subjected to a deep and rigorous examination — and a Fauci trial, conducted to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” may be the only means left for this. 

The justice system already appears to be tending in this direction. The Department of Justice this week charged David Morens — a former senior adviser to Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The government accuses Morens of conspiring against the United States and destroying records related to Covid’s onset, among other crimes (Morens is presumed innocent until proved guilty).

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The Morens indictment mentions “co-conspirators.” Americans must know: was his then-boss, Fauci, one of them? What we already know makes it implausible that he wasn’t. That makes a formal indictment all the more urgent for truth and accountability.

Since the early days of Covid, much of the scientific establishment has been working to discredit the lab-leak theory. As head of NIAID during the pandemic and the face of the government’s response, Fauci was a key player in this effort. Early on, he dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” the notion that Covid might have been created in a lab and leaked by accident. Yet there are reasons to suspect that NIAID under the leadership of Fauci funded the research that may have created Covid.

The case against Fauci, if the Justice Department brings one in the coming days, will likely revolve around charges that he perjured himself in testimony before Congress about this question of research funding and Covid’s origins. At a Senate committee hearing in May 2021, Fauci categorically stated in a tense exchange with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that the NIH and NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. 

“You are entirely and completely incorrect,” Fauci snapped at Paul. “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” At a follow-up hearing in July 2021, Fauci got into it again with the Kentucky senator, saying he didn’t retract his May statement about gain-of-function funding. At one point, he jabbed a finger at Paul and shouted, “If anybody’s lying here, senator, it is you!”

But this week’s indictment of Morens for concealing federal records related to the pandemic has revived the debate about Fauci and created new pressure on the Trump DOJ to revisit Fauci’s truthfulness before Congress. 

The records in question have to do with precisely what Fauci has repeatedly denied: gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — funded by an NIH grant. According to the indictment, Morens pledged to help “Co-Conspirator 1,” described in the indictment as the head of a US-based nonprofit, restore a canceled NIH grant for “Company #1.” The canceled grant was titled, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, and it was canceled amid allegations that Covid came from the Wuhan institute.

The descriptions of Co-Conspirator 1 and Company #1 point directly to Peter Daszak, former head of the now-defunct EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted a 2014 NIH grant to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. (Neither Daszak nor EcoHealth Alliance are named in the indictment, but reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere imply that they are indeed the person and entity referred to in the indictment). 

What’s more, the indictment alleges that these co-conspirators gave Morens “illegal gratuities” and wine for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.” As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it in a statement: “Morens … allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that Covid-19 had natural origins.”

To put the dots together: The government’s case against Morens suggests that the NIH did approve a grant that funded precisely the kind of research that could have created Covid, in the very city where Covid first appeared. Once the pandemic broke out and EcoHealth Alliance lost its NIH funding, Morens allegedly tried to help restore this funding in his official capacity as a senior NIH official, but concealed his efforts to do so. It follows that Fauci’s statements before Congress categorically denying such funding were false.

The indictment also corroborates a statement by NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak, who at a 2024 House committee hearing admitted that the US government funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Asked directly by then-Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) whether NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth Alliance, Tabak said: “It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research. If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”

Splitting hairs over what exactly constitutes gain-of-function research, or what the accepted definition of the term is, was a recurring feature of Fauci’s sparring in Senate hearings with Paul and other lawmakers during the pandemic. At a Senate hearing in November 2021, Paul brought up the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses that EcoHealth Alliance subcontracted to the Wuhan lab through its 2014 NIH grant. Fauci responded by calling Paul’s line of questioning an “egregious misrepresentation,” and insisting that his characterization of the research didn’t meet the NIH’s definition of gain of function, which was formalized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in January of 2017.

Yet Fauci’s own past statements uphold Paul’s definition of gain of function. In a June 2021 letter, Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan — then the Republican ranking members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on the Judiciary, respectively — asked Fauci to reconcile his past statements with his May 2021 assertion under oath that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. 

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The letter quoted Fauci at a 2012 conference on gain-of-function research at which he said: “what historically investigators have done is to actually create gain of function by making mutations, passage adoption, or other genetic techniques, such as reverse genetics.” The letter then quoted the 2014 NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which allowed it to “test predictions of [coronavirus]…transmission…using reverse genetics…” In other words, NIH was contracting research that fit Fauci’s own definition of gain of function. 

“Using your own definition,” wrote Comer and Jordan, “it appears the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology].” They closed their letter by asking Fauci to “explain the apparent discrepancy in your recent testimony.”

Fauci, who once claimed to personally embody science, has been widely criticized for playing fast and loose with the facts. In addition to his shifting statements about masking and social distancing protocols during the pandemic, he was secretly involved in a widely cited March 2020 paper published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine on the “proximal origins” of Covid. The paper was designed specifically to discredit the idea of a lab leak. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors stated. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Fauci mentioned this paper to White House reporters in April 2020 as evidence against the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin — without revealing that he had been involved in its creation, as emails released in a congressional inquiry eventually revealed. RealClearInvestigations journalist Paul Thacker uncovered that Fauci admitted during a multiday deposition by the House Oversight Committee in 2024 that he had indeed read multiple drafts of the paper, and even emailed with the authors about it. Yet Fauci had previously told The New York Times that he wasn’t sure if he ever got around to reading the paper.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as water under the bridge. The pandemic is over, Fauci is out of the government. In the words of that infamous 2022 essay in The Atlantic, can’t we just declare a “pandemic amnesty” and move on?

In a word, no. As RealClear’s Thacker has noted elsewhere, while “dissembling to the media is not a crime, lying to Congress is illegal.” More than any other single person, Fauci was in a position to shed light on the origins of Covid at the moment the pandemic arrived on American shores. It might have required coming clean about what the NIH and NIAID had been funding in China on his watch, and it might have even required him to resign in disgrace over the scandal such an admission would cause.

But it would have been the right thing to do. In addition to helping government officials and medical providers better understand what we were dealing with, possibly even saving American lives, it would have opened up space for a reckoning about what US tax dollars had been paying for overseas. Later, there might have been a chance at accountability for those responsible for funding reckless gain-of-function research.

 Instead, Fauci dissembled about what he knew, the government’s role, and the part he himself played in all of it. There is still a chance to hold him at least partially accountable. But time is running out.

This is one thing that the organisation gets right: Beijing’s behaviour has been disgraceful. But as WHO faces the threat of losing its biggest donor with Donald Trump’s looming return to the White House, perhaps it should have been more honest — especially since its next post was a pledge to fight misinformation. For let us not forget it performed woefully in the pandemic. It assisted China’s cover-up, which inflamed the disease’s spread, and amplified early lies claiming “no clear evidence” of human transmission. It failed to investigate the origins properly. And even now claims its Chinese office “picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ on December 31 2019”, when, in fact, it was alerted by Taiwanese health authorities, on guard against another outbreak of Sars.

But we should not be surprised by a body that follows the diktats of a Communist dictatorship in refusing to recognise Taiwan. By the end of 2019, China’s scientists had already sequenced the genome of the virus. Yet WHO kowtowed so shamefully to Beijing that their joint inquiry into Covid’s origins — with a team of “experts” sent to Wuhan in early 2021 amid huge publicity — promoted a ludicrous theory that the disease jumped to humans from frozen food. To compound these failings, it hired Sir Jeremy Farrar, despite the former Wellcome Trust boss’s exposure as a central player in the bid to stifle debate by branding any suggestions Covid could have come from a laboratory as conspiracy theory. These efforts — led with his friend Anthony Fauci — were a grotesque betrayal of both science and the wider public, yet still this tarnished figure was appointed as WHO’s chief scientific officer.

Sadly, this is all par for the course. The pandemic revealed the arrogant and contemptuous behaviour of leading scientific figures, aided by prominent academic journals, patsy journalists and weak politicians. It is now beyond doubt that they strove to dampen speculation that Covid could be tied to a cutting-edge Wuhan laboratory with financial links to Washington. In recent days, we have seen how this corrosive rot even infected the security world after the Wall Street Journal disclosed suppression of a Pentagon study finding the virus had been manipulated in “gain of function” research. “What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined,” said one FBI scientist.

We must hope all the evidence available to federal authorities on this weirdly contentious issue will be re-examined with Trump’s restoration — especially given his choice of Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest biomedical research agency that helped fund controversial experiments in Wuhan. The Stanford University health economist and lockdown sceptic has said the evidence for a lab leak is “compelling” while criticising establishment efforts to silence dissident voices.

Unfortunately Trump’s outbursts after the pandemic emerged about “the China virus”, and his promotion of daft ideas such as injecting disinfectant to treat Covid, made it easier to ostracise experts who dared question the orthodoxy of natural zoonotic transmission. The concept of an accidental lab leak became bound up in frenzied talk of bioweapons and malevolent activities. Yet his last administration concluded with a carefully worded State Department statement raising valid questions about sick scientists and risky research in Wuhan.

Dismissal of a possible lab leak — and for this to become such a sectarian issue — was always a curious stance in the absence of any firm proof. There were, after all, more than 300 known laboratory-acquired infections and 16 escapes of pathogens in the first 21 years of this century. The same year that Covid erupted in Wuhan, 10,000 people fell ill following leakage from a veterinary research centre in another Chinese city. Even in the weeks before Covid emerged, Farrar and Fauci helped oversee a WHO report highlighting growing risk of global pandemic from an escaped pathogen, which pointed out how scientific advances allowed “disease-causing micro-organisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories”.

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A quick reminder of some facts: Wuhan was home to one of China’s two maximum bio-security labs — and hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with most similar coronaviruses. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) contained the world’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses, had known safety concerns and conducted high-risk “gain of function” research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. Its database of 22,000 samples and many unpublished sequences was taken offline in September 2019 — when some believe the virus emerged.

Yet Farrar was among 27 scientists who signed a now-infamous letter in The Lancet praising Chinese experts for their “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data” and condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by Peter Daszak, whose New York-based EcoHealth Alliance funnelled US taxpayer dollars to WIV, following a teleconference call on February 1 2020 that sparked efforts to discredit lab leak theories.

This call was organised by Farrar in tandem with Fauci and Francis Collins, then head of NIH. Under their guidance, four participants and one other expert wrote a notorious Nature Medicine commentary saying they did not think “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Yet it emerged later that these scientists feared a lab link was ‘“so friggin’ likely” even as they drafted their statement. Farrar complained about “Wild West” biosecurity in Wuhan with Collins. And a senior adviser to Fauci told Daszak he had learned how to make emails “disappear” from freedom of information requests “so I think we are all safe”.

Tragically, every sliver of evidence that has slid into the open since the pandemic has chipped away at public faith in science and politics thanks to the cavalier attitude of certain scientists, the arrogance of self-serving experts, and the complicity of a cabal of prominent figures attempting to deceive the world. Boris Johnson, prime minister during the pandemic, now says “the awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made”. Yet still Lord Vallance — who, as his chief scientific adviser, joined that clandestine teleconference call — was elevated to the House of Lords and appointed science minister by Keir Starmer last year. Needless to say, my freedom of information requests to find out more about his involvement have been thwarted.

We still do not have a conclusive answer to the conundrum of Covid’s origin, despite growing acceptance of a possible lab leak. Yet this remains a crucial debate, important both in terms of accountability for a global public health disaster and to assist protection from another pandemic in the future. There have been jitters again in recent days over fresh scenes of Chinese hospitals overrun with masked people after a surge in cases blamed on flu-like human metapneumovirus — although unlike Covid, this is not a new disease, so there will be levels of immunity in the population from previous infections.

We should not forget, however, this attempted concealment of facts was exposed only by the diligent efforts of a few brave scientists, dissident journalists, data experts and online investigators prepared to challenge the consensus. As one of those involved, I was even subjected to a Facebook shadowban for one UnHerd investigation, which was labelled misinformation until I protested. It was gratifying to be recognised later in Congress as the first to lay out the lab leak hypothesis in mainstream media — but how depressing to see the sluggish response from many colleagues that still clouds this issue.

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Most significantly, it was the Drastic group of investigators who released the Defuse research project dating from 2018. This sought to create viruses with the defining feature of Sars-CoV-2: the furin cleavage site that allows its spike protein to bind so effectively to cells in many human tissues and is not found on any of the other 800 known Sars-releated coronaviruses. The proposal came from EcoHealth, WIV and Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina coronavirologist who pioneered such controversial gain of function research. It was rejected by US funders. Yet Shi Zhengli, the leading bat disease researcher at WIV, refused to answer when asked by a German reporter last year if she had pressed on with such experiments, claiming the issue had “nothing to do with the origin” of Covid.

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.

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.

You can see its shadow in every Western country, from the US and Canada to Ireland and Australia, as well as in every multinational organisation, from the EU to the UN. Rising levels of hate speech and misinformation, we are told, make it more urgent than ever for governments, corporations and multilateral organisations to adopt stronger measures to protect vulnerable populations online.

It is for this reason that Biden’s Department of Homeland Security recently created a “Disinformation Governance Board”, the European Commission crafted a new Digital Services Act and Code of Practice on Disinformation, and the UN is proposing a “Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms”. All of these initiatives are allegedly the product of good intentions; all of them, however, are rooted in the same fallacy: there is little evidence to suggest that hate speech and misinformation are on the rise. On the contrary, Western countries are more tolerant of racial, religious and sexual minorities than ever before. To take one example, the percentage of Americans who approve of marriages between white and black Americans has risen from 4% in 1958 to 87% in 2013 to 94% in 2021.

There are, of course, plenty of examples of misinformation and hatred online, and Twitter and Facebook are right to reduce their spread — but often the threat is exaggerated. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), for instance, recently published a study that concluded that antisemitism was increasing on Twitter. But there is no definitive evidence of rising hate online. The ISD study counted tweets criticising George Soros which didn’t mention his Judaism as antisemitic. Elsewhere, “hate speech” includes the reluctance of some people online to use female pronouns when referring to transwomen — even though one might oppose using female pronouns for natal males and harbour no animus toward transwomen.

Here we can see that what people label as “hatred” and “misinformation” is often merely an opinion they don’t like or which they fear will encourage bad behaviour. In both the UK and the US, this led to government officials demanding that social media platforms censor “often-true” content, including about Covid vaccine side effects, out of fear that such stories would result in vaccine hesitancy.

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What’s more, Facebook and Twitter have also started deleting a significant amount of true content. Between 2020 to 2021, for example, Facebook censored claims that the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab, even though that was always as likely, if not more so, than the natural-origin hypothesis. Twitter also censored an accurate New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop while allowing supporters of his father, Joe Biden, to falsely claim it was a result of “Russian disinformation”.

The global campaign to censor disfavoured views on Twitter and Facebook is therefore rather curious. If there is no evidence that hatred and misinformation are increasing, and ample evidence of inappropriate censorship of true and accurate information, why are politicians across the West calling for greater power to censor?

Some of the demand certainly appears to be grassroots. Since 2016, an increasing number of psychologists have started to document the rise of “concept creep”, the dramatic expansion of what people in Western societies consider to be “harmful”. It used to be that one would have to show physical or financial harm from speech for it to be restricted: often, one would have to commit fraud, incite violence or ruin a person’s career. Today, by contrast, a growing number of people consider petty offences, such as calling a transwoman “he” or denouncing Soros as a “globalist,” to be the cause of “real-world harm”.

Yet this support cannot be taken in isolation; more often than not, it is the result of funding from governments. It was, after all, Renee DiResta, a former CIA Fellow at Stanford University, who proposed that DHS create a “Disinformation Governance Board”; in Brazil, meanwhile, a Supreme Court judge is leading calls for greater censorship; in Canada, it is Justin Trudeau who has sought a crackdown on wrongspeech; and in the UK, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue is funded by the UK government and the US Department of Defense.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that these efforts all share an elitist, anti-populist strain. Many of the government agencies, contractors and NGOs that are advocating for greater censorship have ties to the military, intelligence and security organisations, spawning what I term the “Censorship Industrial Complex”. How this is manifested is relatively straightforward: fearing that a wave of populist political victories would undermine Nato, the EU and the Western Alliance, government intelligence, military and security officials engaged in disinformation campaigns, such as the one claiming Trump was a Russian asset and that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, while demanding censorship of populist and anti-war voices.

Together, these measures constitute nothing short of a world war on free speech. After all, the intention of the UN and the EU is to censor disfavoured speech at a global level, specifically by insisting that Twitter and Facebook obey their dictates or face massive fines and nationwide restrictions.

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So far, one of the greatest obstacles to these censorious ambitions is Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, who has publicly stated that he refuses to comply with EU rules. But Musk is also under enormous pressure from advertisers, many of whom stand with the censorship advocates and heads of state. Under pressure from the Turkish government, for instance, Musk was forced to censor disfavoured Turkish journalists or face Twitter being cut off in the country entirely.

Even if this were not the case, free speech has never been a gift that can be secured by one person. Rather, for it to survive, it is up to the citizens of the world to insist that governments stop demanding, directly or indirectly through the NGOs they fund, that social media platforms censor disfavoured views. And to the extent that content moderation by social media companies is inevitable, they must be transparent about what content they are restricting, how they are restricting it, and why.

Nor is any of this outside the realms of possibility. It was encouraging, for instance, to see the Department of Homeland Security shut down its “Disinformation Governance Board” three weeks after introducing it, following an online backlash. In Europe, too, resistance is growing to the Digital Services Act. And, on Twitter, we have seen rowdy and rousing opposition to the UN’s proposed “Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms”, as well as new censorship proposals in Ireland, Brazil, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand.

Most of all, we need to change how we perceive ostensibly earnest calls for reducing “hate speech” and “misinformation”. We need to train our ears to hear such language as pretexts for government censorship. We need to remind our fellow citizens of the enormous progress we have made against hatred and discrimination over the decades and centuries. And, perhaps most of all, we should feel insulted, patronised and threatened by those elites who are trying to undermine that precious thing we have been fighting for since society was born: our right to express ourselves, however much it might offend them.

So how strange to discover that this same man had previously warned that risky research was “intensifying” threats from “lab-enhanced viruses”. In fact, two years before the pandemic erupted, Daszak was involved in drafting a presentation about the dangers of engineered viruses being accidentally or even deliberately released into the world.

In this newly uncovered presentation, the scientist warned that “gain-of-function” research — which boosts the transmissibility of viruses — was “elevating the risk” that “deadly novel biological agents” could be released through accident or design. The document, demanding the urgent development of counter-measures, put such risk at the same level as natural spillover from the wild. It even focused on the specific threat from coronaviruses.

Yet after the pandemic erupted in Wuhan, Daszak headed the charge against those claiming the mysterious new disease might be potentially linked to research in the city, with even the British Medical Journal branding him the leader of the campaign to label such critics as conspiracy theorists.

Little wonder the disclosure of this document has provoked angry claims of hypocrisy. Richard Ebright, an expert on biosecurity and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told me it meant that Daszak and his allies have spent the past three years not telling the world the whole truth. The revelations, he said, underlined “the shocking recklessness” of funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan that was being carried out at a low-level biosecurity lab “with no protections beyond a pair of gloves, a lab coat and a hood”.

Today, Daszak is the $460,368-a-year president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based group that channelled US research funding to Wuhan Institute of Virology until the payments were exposed and terminated by President Trump in April 2020. The former Kingston University snail researcher responded with outrage, rounding on suggestions that research in Wuhan might have sparked the pandemic. Typical was a June 2020 article in The Guardian entitled “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” that insisted claims of “frankenviruses” made in labs were “the latest chapter in a tale of blame, misinformation and finger-pointing”.

Most infamously, he was the covert organiser of a statement in The Lancet journal that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and absurdly praised China’s “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. Signed by 27 experts, the document helped to crush scientific, political and media debate on whether the new virus might have been manipulated or leaked from a laboratory. The journal was forced later to add a note clarifying Daszak’s “competing interests” and he was removed from heading up its own inquiry into the virus’ origins.

Yet the presentation for the launch of his Global Virome Project (GVP) suggested something very different: that the risks of lab leaks and gain-of-function research needed to be taken seriously. It was seeking $1.3 billion funding over 10 years to help end “the pandemic era” by identifying viruses with the “greatest potential to infect humans and their laboratory-enhanced variants so we can prepare for them before they jump to us”.

The GVP was chaired by the infectious diseases expert Dennis Carroll, another of the signatories to The Lancet statement. Daszak was the project’s director, secretary and treasurer and emails obtained through freedom of information requests demonstrate that he had helped draft the pitch document.

The 40 slides prepared for the 2017 presentation focus on “dual threats” posed by both natural emergence of diseases and the accidental or intentional release of “laboratory enhanced variants”. They warn that gain-of-function research is inflaming the danger of “illnesses and deaths” along with “mass hysteria and panic”. They propose a 10-year project to “develop countermeasures” and build a huge database of viruses to enable their “rapid detection of natural and laboratory-enhanced threats”.

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This presentation reflects sensible fears held by many sensible scientists. One page discloses plans for quick identification of engineered viruses. Another underlines the need to “rapidly recognise a lab-enhanced virus”. A third highlights the evidence of Sars-like coronaviruses in Yunnan — a tropical region of southern China where bats roost and scientists from Wuhan Institute of Virology went to collect their samples — while finding no signs of such infections in Wuhan itself.

A version of the slide deck came to light in an email exchange between Daszak and his GVP colleagues, obtained in a freedom of information request from US Right to Know, a public health campaign group. The full set was found by Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist and member of the Drastic group which challenged the science establishment’s narrative that Covid almost certainly spilled over naturally from animals.“When Daszak needed to protect his back,” says Demaneuf, “anybody who dares say exactly what he wrote in these slides was called a conspiracy theorist — or worse.”

Emails indicate that the GVP organisers also held discussions on their plans with Washington defence research agencies. Last month, FBI director Christopher Wray said his agency had “for quite some time assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”. It is now backed by the Department of Energy, which oversees a network of laboratories engaged in advanced biology, although other US intelligence agencies disagree with their conclusion.

After the pandemic started, the GVP stalled. Three months ago, a federal watchdog accused US funding authorities and EcoHealth Alliance of “deficiencies” in their monitoring and oversight of the work conducted on coronavirus strains at Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak has collaborated on extensive field research in Yunnan and 17 scientific papers since 2005 with the laboratory’s leading bat coronavirus expert Shi Zhengli.

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Science journals have been corrupted by China

By Ian Birrell

Last month, EcoHealth Alliance boasted of winning fresh US grants to “identify” spillovers of bat coronaviruses in three other Asian nations by sampling thousands of bats and other mammals. “This will help identify the potential role of other wildlife as intermediate hosts in the transmission of bat CoVs — and may also help to shed light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2,” it claimed. The body did not respond to requests for comment on the GVP presentation.

Critics of virus hunting schemes argue that they present high risk while delivering few tangible benefits. A year-long investigation by The Washington Post concluded that such research could be placing the planet in greater danger of another pandemic, accusing the US of continuing to funnel big sums into overseas research despite insufficient oversight as regulation fails to keep pace with new technologies.There are thought to be thousands of biocontainment labs handling dangerous pathogens, although the precise number around the world is unknown.

Simon Wain-Hobson, the virologist who discovered the genetic blueprint of HIV, is among those wanting to see a ban on gain-of-function work.  He told me that Daszak’s presentation exposed the “fallacious logic” of suggesting engineered viruses could help to predict pandemics or assist production of preventative drugs and vaccines. “The science fiction goes on,” he said.