Free Republic

Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers. Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials...

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...

US intelligence agencies remain divided on the origin of COVID, but at this point we're all aware that, at a minimum, there's a real possibility the virus that killed millions around the world escaped from a Wuhan lab. China has of course denied that possibility but two US epidemiologists have written an opinion piece today warning that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is still involved in potentially dangerous research with bat coronaviruses. In fact, the lab has discovered a new virus which it says could infect humans and could be even more deadly than COVID-19. It's research was just published...

Chinese scientists are planning “ominous” experiments similar to those that could have triggered the Covid pandemic, experts have warned. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) published new research this month announcing it had found a bat coronavirus that can enter human cells, similar to a Covid-19 infection. The paper concludes with calls for “further investigation” into strains that have more infectious spike proteins, as well as testing in human transgenic mice. The first known Covid cases emerged just eight miles from WIV, which was known to be collecting and manipulating coronaviruses. The institute was stripped of US funding for carrying...

Researchers at the Chinese lab accused of leaking the COVID-19 virus have now discovered a new coronavirus in bats that closely matches the one that led to the deadly worldwide outbreak in 2020, according to a study. The virus, unearthed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, carries the risk of animal-to-human transmission, though the infection has not yet been identified in a living person, according to a study published in the scientific journal Cell. The bat virus, referred to as HKU5-CoV-2, uses the same human receptor as SARS-CoV-2, a strain of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The newly discovered bat...

John Jay once declared, “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” The citizens of the Republic are its rightful stewards.Yet unelected bureaucrats, operating in the shadows, funneled taxpayer money into high-risk gain-of-function research—and when exposed, they scrambled to cover their tracks. Only now are we beginning to grasp the full extent of the federal government’s entanglement in dangerous research conducted within the borders of our greatest adversary.For years, government agencies—along with likely universities and private corporations—have secretly financed these risky experiments—most notably at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—without public knowledge or accountability.Recent investigations reveal as much as...

VIDEODr. Anthony Fauci delivers a PSA warning about Monkeypox as well as a new virus it mutated into as a result of gain of function research.

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...

Despite years of warnings that China operates an illicit biological weapons program, the U.S. military remains unable to determine whether it sends American tax dollars to Beijing for research that could make pathogens more dangerous or deadly, the Pentagon’s chief watchdog declared in a stunning new warning to policymakers. “The DoD did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to determine whether the DoD provided funding to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries for research related to enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential,” the Pentagon inspector general concluded in a report released this month.

The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.\ On Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the halls of Congress and testified before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He was questioned about several topics related to the government’s handling of Covid-19, including how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic.For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a...

(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...

At long last, National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress Thursday that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic. “Dr. Tabak,” asked Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, “did NIH fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through [Manhattan-based nonprofit] EcoHealth [Alliance]?” “It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” Tabak answered. “If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”

After being denounced as a conspiracy for years, the Covid lab leak hypothesis is now considered the most likely origin of the virus... Researchers from Australia and Arizona used a risk analysis tool- which they described as the most comprehensive yet - to determine the chances the SARS-CoV-2 virus was of 'unnatural' or 'natural' origin. The team compared the characteristics of the virus and the pandemic to 11 criteria that analyzed things like the rarity of a virus, the timing of a pandemic, the population infected, the spread of a virus and the unexpected symptoms of a virus. Based on...

COVID-19 may have been created in a Chinese lab, a British professor told the UN Wednesday, with another expert claiming that evidence of the likelihood has reached “the level of a smoking gun.” Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, was quoted saying in a new Wall Street Journal article that the virus that killed millions around the world may actually have been manmade in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. He cited evidence found in a 2018 document from the lab that talked of making such a virus. “[The document] elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence...

I had previously made the case that the totality of circumstances surrounding SARS-CoV-2 origins is sufficient for probable cause to believe the virus originated in a lab. In addition to the circumstances surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence we lack for a zoonotic origin makes our case even stronger. Outside the narrow lens of mainstream media outlets unable to cover this globally pertinent forensic case, the biggest scientific murder-mystery of the century is being solved. New evidence has emerged to strengthen the lab origin case. The flawed papers claiming a zoonotic origin have been revealed as even more hopelessly...

FBI’s entire 25-person Chinese intelligence squad knew of reliable human intelligence that SARS-CoV-2 Covid leaked from a lab...Over the last several months, Public has reported on a growing body of evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the Covid pandemic escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. Last year, Public and Racket were the first to report that US government officials had identified that the first patients to become sick with Covid worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).Now, Public has learned from multiple sources that the FBI knew since at least March 2020 that Covid was the result...

Sky News is doing the work that our own MSM refuses to do. Ever since it emerged, the origins of COVID should have been one of the top two or three stories in the world. After all, the disease itself was ravaging the world, the responses to the virus were doing even more damage, and the people in charge of responding to the virus were, at the very least, suspects in the case. Yet even discussion of the possibility of a lab leak was suppressed, and anybody who brought up the possibility was labeled a conspiracy theorist. Social media sites...

JUST IN - CIA rewarded multiple "analysts with significant financial incentives" to change their COVID origins conclusion from a lab leak to zoonosis, according to a "highly credible" whistleblower - U.S. House Select Subcommittee https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1701607765431783748 https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023.09.12-SSCP-HPSCI-Letter-to-CIA-Re.-Origins-of-COVID.pdf

Fauci was alerted in January 2020 that NIH had underwritten the discovery of dozens of novel coronaviruses of the same species as SARS-CoV-2. NIH had also funded research of these viruses in Wuhan. Anthony Fauci, a leader of the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic and one of the most influential scientists in infectious diseases research for decades, knew in extraordinary detail the breadth of novel coronavirus research underway in Wuhan, China, within a month of the globe learning of the Wuhan novel coronavirus. Fauci had been informed by January 2020 that his institute had funded the discovery and study...