Free Republic

As soon as COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan, China, it was a high possibility that the virus originated in one of the two high-security labs studying bat viruses in that city — the National Bio-Safety Laboratory and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.The Wuhan Institute of Virology was of particular concern. U.S. State Department cables in 2018 warned of extreme sloppiness at the lab. Although the lab’s research on bat coronaviruses was partially funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (of which Anthony Fauci is the director), the warnings went unaddressed.Early in 2020, a...

The Biden administration shut down a State Department probe into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, looking specifically at whether the novel coronavirus came from a Chinese lab, according to CNN. The inquiry, which was launched by “allies of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,” began last fall, but was ended in the spring after draft findings were presented to Biden officials. Questions were raised about the legitimacy of the findings and the project was deemed to be an ineffective use of resources, explained a source familiar with the decision.Sources involved in the Trump-era inquiry rejected criticisms over the quality of...

Data was withheld from World Health Organization investigators who travelled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday (Mar 30). The United States, the European Union and other Western countries immediately called for China to give "full access" to independent experts to all data about the original outbreak in late 2019. In its final report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and...

<p>Nikolai Petrovsky was scrolling through social media after a day on the ski slopes when reports describing a mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, caught his eye. It was early January 2020, and Petrovsky, an immunologist, was at his vacation getaway in Keystone, Colorado, which is where he goes most years with his family to flee the searingly hot summers at home in South Australia.</p>