Free Republic

One is an event, two is a coincidence—but three is a pattern. On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that a third Chinese national has been nabbed for allegedly trying to smuggle biological materials into the United States. Making things more disturbing is a fact that a Hollywood screenwriter couldn’t have come up with: the smuggler was studying in, where else, Wuhan, China. You’ve heard of Wuhan, haven’t you? The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Michigan released a statement alleging that Chengxuan Han, “a citizen of the PRC” (People's Republic of China), sent packages containing biological material...

A dangerous new coronavirus discovered in China could spark the next pandemic, scientists warn. American researchers say the new HKU5-CoV-2 virus is just one 'small' mutation away from being able to infect and cause outbreaks in humans. The discovery is causing alarm because the pathogen is closely related to MERS, a highly lethal virus that kills up to a third of those it infects. Adding to the controversy is the fact HKU5 was first documented in bats by researchers from the Chinese lab where Covid is feared to have leaked from. For the latest study, a team from Washington State...

Dr. Anthony Fauci was told in a secret teleconference that the CCP virus had very likely leaked from a laboratory in China, yet still pushed the alternate narrative that it had originated naturally, new evidence allegedly shows. Redacted emails that were recently made public suggest that Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), initiated efforts to cover up evidence pointing to a laboratory leak as the origin of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19. Evidence suggests that Fauci also actively shaped a highly influential academic paper first published on Feb. 16, 2020,...

The American media is doing its best to ignore the biggest news this week. Nope, not Covid’s fifth anniversary. You may have noticed that every legacy media outlet is reminding you it’s been exactly five years since the Little Epidemic That Could started its long chug into your lungs, or at least your upper respiratory tract. In reality, they’re as wrong about the date as everything else Covid. People started getting sick in Wuhan in December 2019. Or was it November? Maybe even October? Whatever, the Chinese have made sure we’ll never know. But it was March 11, 2020 when...

Chancellors Merkel and Scholz are said to have kept secret an explosive intelligence assessment of how the pandemic beganGerman spies were almost certain that the Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory, only for successive chancellors to bury the potentially explosive intelligence assessment, according to reports. Investigations by the newspapers Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung found that the chancellery of Angela Merkel commissioned the foreign intelligence agency, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), to assess the origins of the virus in 2020. The BND analysed public data and material obtained as part of an intelligence operation codenamed Saaremaa. This included scientific data...

Let’s get this straight. Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and USAID handed over $41 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—the same lab now linked to Ben Hu, the likely Patient Zero of COVID-19. And the kicker? That funding ended right before the pandemic started. (source here) [embedded image] This isn’t a conspiracy theory—it’s all right there in FOIA-obtained documents exposing how EcoHealth Alliance acted as a middleman, shuffling money from the U.S. government to Chinese scientists working on gain-of-function experiments—the kind that make viruses deadlier and more transmissible. And where was all this happening? In a...

One of the biggest official COVID actors gets at least some comeuppance. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has officially suspended and debarred Dr. Peter Daszak for five years from participating in federal procurement programs due to his role as former president and CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. (EHA). This decision, announced on January 17, 2025, follows a Suspension and Proposed Debarment Notice issued nearly a year earlier, on May 15, 2024. In addition to Daszak’s suspension, EcoHealth Alliance itself has also been debarred from federal procurement programs. The suspension of Daszak’s funding is based on evidence...

Everybody assumes that Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci to shield him from his actions just before and during his appalling performance during the COVID pandemic. Surely that was a major part of the reason, especially since Fauci gained so much prominence during that sorry episode in our nation's history. Were it not for COVID he would have left as a largely (and unjustly) respected public servant who was remarkably hale and hearty in his 80s. People in the know would have stared daggers at his back as he went on to enjoy his pension, but most Americans wouldn't even notice his...

"Today’s decision is not only a victory for the U.S. taxpayer, but also for American national security and the safety of citizens worldwide," House Oversight Chairman James Comer said in a statement. The House Oversight Committee on Friday announced that the Department of Health and Human Services officially cut all federal funding and disbarred EcoHealth Alliance and its former President Peter Daszak for five years. The company and Daszak allegedly facilitated and passed taxpayer money for to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which is a suspected source of COVID-19, and did so without proper government oversight, according to...

WASHINGTON — Today, after an eight-month investigation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cut off all funding and formally debarred EcoHealth Alliance Inc. (EcoHealth) and its former President, Dr. Peter Daszak, for five years based on evidence uncovered by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. In a new letter, HHS states “that a period of debarment for Dr. Daszak is necessary to protect the Federal Government’s business interests.” This letter also confirms that EcoHealth terminated Dr. Daszak’s employment effective January 6, 2025. EcoHealth and Dr. Daszak facilitated gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without proper oversight and...

We now know the name of the Chinese defector who has been working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for a few months and what his position within the Chinese military and government was, among other details.Matthew Brazil and Jeff Stein at Spy Talk reported on the “rumor,” and gave the name and background of the rumored defector:Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.Dong is, or was, a longtime official...

Just a reminder to everyone about this Washington Post article from April 14, 2020. It says that two years earlier, U.S. visitors said the Wuhan lab was not taking the necessary steps to prevent COVID from leaking.

Say, remember when the government and the media treated the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID-19's origin as a conspiracy theory? At the time, social-media platforms suppressed discussion and debate over that explanation. The media treating anyone who noticed that a deadly and novel coronavirus had emerged in the same place where biologists just so happened to be conducting gain-of-function research on --ta da! -- coronaviruses.The question of origin became so important to foreign policy and epidemiological strategy that Joe Biden ordered the US intel community to do an analysis to pin down the origins of the deadly pandemic. That review concluded...

A former director of the CDC under Donald Trump says he believes COVID-19 may have been born in a North Carolina laboratory as part of a secret biodefense program. Robert Redfield has previously been a proponent of the 'lab leak' theory which posits the disease came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Now Redfield - a frequent critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci - says that the disease may have origins in the Tar Heel State. Appearing on the Third Opinion podcast, Redfield flat out stated that COVID-19 was 'intentionally engineered as a part of a biodefense program.' He...

The Chinese Communist Party has ramped up its propaganda efforts to control the narrative surrounding the novel coronavirus—by rejecting criticism and painting a picture that Beijing is effectively handling the outbreak. The regime’s propaganda has gone through several phases: first ignoring the severity of the outbreak, then creating positive coverage, and now, blaming the United States. Internal government documents obtained by The Epoch Times have highlighted how the regime bungled its data tracking and censored discussions of the outbreak, fueling the virus’s spread. High-ranking communist authorities have pushed a handful of talking points to deflect blame, including that the origin...

The same Chinese facility that is understood to have leaked the global COVID-19 virus may have also leaked a “highly evolved” strain of polio, according to a new report obtained by Daily Mail. According to a recent study, the strain that infected a 4-year-old boy in the Anhui province of China is “99%” identical to a variety stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, 200 miles away. The child became infected in the midst of the province of Anhui’s larger virus outbreak. Molecular biologist Richard Ebright, who was not involved with the research, maintains that “the findings underscore the shocking...

(1) “The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.” the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for more than 10 years, led by Dr. Shi Zhengli ... (2) part of it comes down to a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project called Defuse, which aimed to create a SARS-like virus with a unique feature called a furin cleavage site that would enhance its infectiousness in humans. The SARS-CoV-2 virus has that feature, she says, and genetic data suggest it...

Authorities in China were expected on Monday to release a citizen journalist jailed for four years after she documented the early phases of the coronavirus outbreak from the central city of Wuhan in 2020. Zhang Zhan, 40, had travelled to Wuhan in early 2020 from Shanghai where she was based, posting first-hand accounts ... After several months of reporting that included videos.. she was detained in May 2020. She went on hunger strike in late June, court documents seen by Reuters said, prompting police to strap her hands and force-feed her with a tube, her lawyers said at the time....

NEW State Department documents reviewed by @COVIDSelect suggest COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China and the CCP covered it up. These classified documents were previously released in an unclassified and highly redacted FOIA production to @USRightToKnow . Today, Chairman @RepBradWenstrup requested @StateDept rapidly declassify the documents and share the truth about the origins of COVID-19 with the American people👇

American scientists applied to engineer coronaviruses with remarkable similarities to SARS-CoV-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018, just one year before the pandemic’s outbreak, according to newly released internal documents. The 2018 grant proposal and related documents — obtained by the watchdog group U.S. Right to Know through a Freedom of Information request — reveal that an American virologist working with the Wuhan lab planned to engineer a virus that resembles SARS-CoV-2 as part of a U.S.-China research collaboration called “DEFUSE.” The research project was to be led by EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City-based research nonprofit that...