LAB LEAK OR NATURAL EMERGENCE: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN WUHAN?

Sharri Markson is the Investigations Writer at The Australian and host of Sharri on Sky News Australia. In 2020, Sharri Markson began reporting on little known investigations being made into the origins of the global pandemic COVID-19. Commonly believed to have begun in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the general view was that the virus originated from a local wet market selling bats. Markson, however, stumbled on information that suggested the virus was not only man made but had been leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. What followed was a media battle to prove an unpopular thesis – against China’s resistance to any suggestion the lab was at fault. Sharri Markson spoke for The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 22 June 2021. Her forthcoming book What Really Happened in Wuhan – the cover-ups, the conspiracies and the classified research will be published in October 2021.

LAB LEAK OR NATURAL EMERGENCE: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN WUHAN? 

SHARRI MARKSON

My journey investigating the topic of the origins of the COVID-19 began in early March 2020. It was before we knew it was going to be a global pandemic, although of course the outbreak had started spreading globally. Within weeks, Australia would be in lockdown. But, at this point, we didn’t know that. I texted one of my best contacts, just out of a passing interest – a contact who is connected to both the Intelligence community and the upper echelons of government. I asked him where the agencies thought the virus had originated. He texted me back, of course on an encrypted app, to say that Intelligence agencies suspected the virus might have come from a laboratory in Wuhan, one that worked in biological warfare. That was early March 2020.

I thought that was interesting but I moved on with reporting on politics at the time. And the lockdowns that were being imposed by the government. In one of my political columns for the Daily Telegraph, I mentioned that senior sources in an Intelligence agency thought the virus might have come out of a laboratory. And the reaction, from that one line, on Twitter was explosive. Remember, this was late March 2020 at this point, well before Donald Trump or Mike Pompeo or anyone had come out and said that the virus may have started in a laboratory. That didn’t happen until mid-April.

With just that passing mention, in a political column, there were reporters at The Guardian and at the ABC – which took me up on that, on Twitter, and said it was a conspiracy theory. I thought this very odd given that the original text message, which I’d raised with other senior officials in government as well, said that this was a “possibility”. Fast forward to April and my editor at the time at the Daily Telegraph, Ben English, and another senior executive, Kathy Lipari, asked me to lead a series looking at China’s cover up of the Corona virus.

At this point, we were in lockdown. I think you can all remember it.  Anyone who has children will know how hard it is to suddenly be in lockdown with the whole family at home. No one is going out because all the cafes and restaurants are closed – and you’re suddenly cooking every single meal, every single day, doing all of the cleaning and extra washing because everyone is at home. That was the environment at the time. I wasn’t really enthusiastic about leading coverage into a series looking at China’s coverup when I had my hands full. But I felt that I had to say yes. Reluctantly, I agreed to do this. Within days of making calls, I had been given an incredible tip, again from a good pre-existing contact. This contact gave me two names.

He told me the names of Peng Zhou and Shi Zhengli. My contact said to me, “Look at their links with Australia.” I discovered that Peng Zhou had worked in Australia at the CSIRO, at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, for three years, from 2011 to 2014.  He was by then the number two to Shi Zhengli in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These scientists had become the focus of a very early Intelligence agency probe into the activities of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They were looking at what was going on in this laboratory, in the heart of the city, where the virus had broken out. This was April 2020. Then I found out that Shi Zhengli was famously known as the “Bat Lady” across the world, famous for her work with bat corona virus, and, her Institute has the world’s largest bat coronavirus collection.

There are only two laboratories in the world that do what’s called “gain of function” work, genetically manipulating bat coronaviruses to make them “gain of function”, to make them even more lethal. “Gain a function” experiments aim to make viruses more infectious and more deadly or virulent, often to humans. The technical definition involves experimentation that is expected to increase the transmissibility or virulence of pathogens. That seems absurd to us. Why create new viruses that never existed in nature before, why would you want to do this? Scientists say that it can help predict pandemics, because they can work out in advance which viruses have the ability to make that species cross zenographic barrier to humans. By doing that, they can perhaps develop therapeutics or a vaccine to treat it. The reason they do it is about predicting a pandemic and hopefully avoiding one.

There are scientists around the world who strongly disagree with “gain of function” research. This has been a topic that has been hotly debated since at least 2012. At the time, there was a very controversial experiment where a deadly new influenza virus was created by scientists and the research was published in a scientific paper. Other scientists said this was like providing the recipe for a chemical bomb. Anyone out there can copy it.

At the time, Anthony Fauci was the US Director of Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland USA, or the Director of NIAID. He wrote a paper on this debate. The debate wasn’t something that mainstream media by and large covered, but there was a heated debate amongst scientists. Anthony Fauci wrote a paper, which he published in 2012, addressing this issue. He acknowledged the “gain of function” research could spark a pandemic, but he argued that it was worth the risk because of the benefits that it could produce, namely that it could also prevent a pandemic. He called the research important and he said that the scientific community needed to do a better job of explaining to the public why this research should continue.

At the same time, there was a group of scientists called the Cambridge Working Group. They were very eminent, qualified, brilliant scientists who strongly argued, begged, petitioned (there were hundreds of them, more than 500 international scientists are signatories to the Cambridge Working Group) governments to change the law so that “gain of function” research would be banned. Two years later, a voluntary ban was introduced for influenza research. Two years after that, in 2014 in the United States, there was a permanent ban for 22 fields of research which included MERS, Coronaviruses and influenza. As far as any US officials knew, this ban was in place. No one revisited it, it wasn’t top of mind for any officials.

You could argue that the agencies and the intelligence agencies didn’t have their eye on the ball because this wasn’t something that was at the front of what they were concerned about. I’ve now interviewed a number of Intelligence chiefs. Former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove admits they didn’t have a pandemic as top of their threat list; they were worrying about terrorists and various other things.

In 2017, Fauci, under a new administration, had finished a review by his agency into “gain of function” research. He decided it was time to lift the ban and he did this in a meeting in the White House. It was at a relatively junior meeting for the Office of Science and Technology Policy where he raised the matter. One official described this to me as, “It just got rammed through. It wasn’t raised with anyone senior. They weren’t aware that this was going on.”

Another official said to me that Fauci took advantage of the chaos in the Trump administration to overturn such a significant ban and no one was any the wiser. There was also a lot of changeover of staff in the administration, so national security advisers were coming and going. People who were there at the time of the pandemic, might not have been aware of what Fauci had done in 2017. So, the significance was that I took the issue back to Australia – and to that early report that I did in April and May. I discovered that these scientists, who’d been engaging in this dangerous research, were genetically manipulating coronaviruses, I didn’t know the term “gain a function” yet.

I’ve gone back recently and read that story I wrote in May last year. It was big; we ran it front page in The Daily Telegraph – six pages in total. I don’t mention the term “gain of function”, but I talk about the research they were doing. I describe how it was genetically manipulating viruses to create a new virus that had no cure, no vaccine, no treatment. Shi Zhengli admits in her research papers that there is no known cure. To find out if it’s transmissible to humans, they use mice, but humanised ones. You’d need a scientist to explain how this works. Basically, they use human cells in mice to work out if it can be transmissible to humans. It’s quite extraordinary technology that was developed by the University of North Carolina and a scientist called Ralph Baric, who did this research with Shi Zhengli.

My story revealed, firstly, the names of scientists that the Intelligence agencies were investigating; secondly, that Intelligence agencies were investigating a lab leak and, thirdly, that these scientists had been trained in Australia by Australian government funding and had worked here, one of them for three years. It was quite an explosive story and it went around the world. As part of my research for that story, I obtained a research paper, or dossier, through contacts, that primarily detailed the concerns that Western governments held about China’s cover up of the virus.

So, I put all this research into this six page investigative piece. You would think that after presenting such unbelievable evidence of the sort of research that was happening in Wuhan, that this would have been a topic that was investigated and followed up on by other journalists, as it is now internationally. At the time, it wasn’t. Instead, as you may know, I was ridiculed for the report by the ABC, by the Guardian, by the Sydney Morning Herald and other publications – as well as others that I don’t read, like Crikey. There was a strong sense that people were attacking me over my story and instead of actually looking at the research that I was presenting – that these scientists were genetically manipulating coronaviruses, that agencies were investigating Wuhan as the source of the outbreak and that these scientists had worked in Australia. There was room for so much more investigation there.

Instead my critics in the media focused on the source of one part of that story, the dossier. They tried to work out who my source was, attacked me for it, linking it to the Trump administration. In fact, the very first comments that US President Donald Trump made, saying that there was evidence that the virus came from a lab, he only made in mid-April. It was in response to a question at a press conference.  He’d never said it before mid-April.

It is amazing to realise how this theory came to be regarded as a conspiracy theory. It’s something that has only been unpicked now by international journalists. I only discovered it when I was writing the book. It was such an awakening, an eye opening discovery to me when I realised this. The Chinese narrative had taken hold from day one. Everything we knew was Chinese disinformation. It wasn’t just a cover up by China of the virus, which is well established, but it was a cover up of scientists. It was a shut down of scientists, of scientific journals and then, through that, of the media. The media trusted the scientists.

On 6 February 2020, before any of us even realised this was going to be a global pandemic, the scientist Peter Daszak, President of the Eco Health Alliance, a not-for-profit group based in New York. He had worked with Shi Zhengli and the Wuhan Institute of Virology for 15 years. His name is literally next to Shi Zhengli’s on many of their scientific papers, dozens of papers. He’s a co-author and he would go bat sampling with her. That’s what Eco Health did, bat sampling. Not only had Peter Daszak worked with Shi Zhengli for 15 years, but he had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funnelled from the NIH. The money he gave to the Wuhan Institute was a sub grant.

In total, the Eco Health Alliance has had $US60 million in US grants. Some of that, about $US600,000 that we know of, was funnelled through to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We do not know where the rest of the $US60 million has gone. That information is not in the public domain at this point. The point is that Peter Daszak, a highly respected scientist, had worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for 15 years and had funded its work. It is such a crucial point. On 1 January 2020, before the coronavirus had even been reported in the newspapers – the first reports in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Times and London Report, were all on 6 January and 7  January – Peter Daszak tweeted that there was a spreading virus and China was going an excellent job dealing with it. Professor Eddie Holmes, the NSW Scientist of the Year at the University of Sydney, tweeted back saying he agreed. He added that China’s Centre for Disease Control would do an excellent job dealing with this outbreak.

On 6 February 2020, Peter Daszak then sent emails to other esteemed scientists around the world, saying that there was a conspiracy taking hold that the virus came from a Chinese lab. He asked them to be signatories on a letter that he was going to publish in the Lancet supporting their Chinese colleagues and saying that this is misinformation. Again, I stress, this is 6 February 2020. Trump hasn’t said a word about the issue until mid-April 2020. So this is not responding to Trump. Emails go back and forth, hundreds of pages of these and in the end the scientists agree to sign a letter. In the letter, Peter Daszak says that he wants to keep his involvement quiet, so as not to muddy the waters.

This letter is published in the Lancet, one of the most distinguished scientific, medical journals internationally. The letter says that it is misinformation, a conspiracy, to suggest that the virus originated in a lab, and that there’s no evidence for it.

The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, there is no evidence the signatories can show that the virus had a natural origin. So it was an opinion piece, if you like. Secondly, there were no conflicts of interest disclosed, none. No one was aware that Peter Daszak was behind the letter; no one was even aware that he worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

None of this would be discovered until these emails emerged under a Freedom of Information Act search in November 2020. It was achieved by the not-for-profit group US Right To Know. Its head is Gary Ruskin. I’ve had him on my Sky News show a couple of times on a Sunday night – so you might have seen him being interviewed there. He doesn’t have political affiliations; he just put in a bunch of FOI requests and he uncovered these emails. The emails revealed that Peter Daszak was behind this early letter from the scientists. Then, even worse, the WHO investigation finally took place. The US suggested three names for people that they would like to be involved in the WHO.

Those individuals were rejected and, instead, the only US citizen to be included on that WHO team was Peter Daszak. Liam Mendes, one of my amazing researchers for my book, has analysed all of Peter Daszak’s tweets. There were about 100 tweets in which Daszak mentioned the word “conspiracy”.  All of this time, Peter Daszak was prolific in the traditional media and on social media saying that it was a conspiracy to suggest that the virus may have originated in a lab. This was while those talking about the lab theory only said it was “a line of inquiry” or that it’s a “possibility”, or that intelligence agencies were investigating it as a possibility, and none of us knew for sure where the virus originated.

When the WHO investigative team was in Wuhan, it spent just three hours at the laboratory, out of a two week trip. In those three hours at the laboratory, they talked about the conspiracy of a lab leak. They decided they needed to address the conspiracy idea because of all the media attention. Peter Daszak has admitted subsequently that he did not ask the Wuhan Institute of Virology about its missing virus database – a database that could hold some 19,000 bat samples it had collected along with some 3,000 coronavirus bat samples. The data base had suddenly disappeared, had gone offline, was missing. On 12 September 2019, it was taken off the internet.

Shi Zhengli claimed it was subject to hacking attempts, but this has never been proven. And there’s been no explanation given for why, all this time later, it has never been reuploaded and never been provided to any investigative agencies. Peter Daszak has admitted that the WHO investigation team did not even ask for access to these virus samples. There couldn’t be a more crucial piece of evidence that WHO should look for than the virus samples. What viruses does the Wuhan Institute of Virology hold? This is, as I said, the institute that has the largest bat coronavirus database in the world. What virus databases does it hold?

Where are the list of the full 3,000 bat coronaviruses that they’ve collected? The WHO group didn’t ask. It was a failed whitewash of an investigation. Yet, all the media reporting directly afterward, or most of it, just said WHO found the virus was extremely unlikely to have come from a lab. There has been no adequate investigation. But we’re starting to get an idea of how Chinese disinformation, the Chinese narrative, took hold from the start – some of the figures who’d been intimately involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology played such a crucial role in shaping the public narrative. They used the very institutions we trust. If you can’t trust scientists, if you can’t trust the Lancet, what can you trust?

This is why the media got it wrong. They were listening to something that was published in the Lancet, they were listening to supposedly credible scientists, not knowing that there were such egregious conflicts of interests. Now these conflicts of interest, as I say, have been unpicked slowly, after all of this time and step by step, as more evidence emerges and we’ve started to realise what happened. “

A second crucial part of why the narrative took hold the way it did is that there were scientists who did their own analysis of the virus SARS-COV-2 – that’s the virus behind COVID-19. They noticed there were unusual things about it that might not point to a natural origin, that might suggest a laboratory construct, or that it had been the subject of “gain of function” genetic manipulation.

One of those scientists, is our very own Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, from Flinders University in Adelaide. He wrote a paper in May 2020 that showed how SARS-COV-2 has a higher binding affinity to humans than to any other animal – meaning it is more infectious to humans than to bats even, or pangolin, or horse, or snake, or rat. He looked at any credible mammal using an Oracle supercomputer that he repurposed for this exercise. It meant he could run the modelling to see which mammal, which host, the virus infects the most. And this was such a surprising finding for him to find that the spike protein of SARS-COV-2 had higher binding affinity to human ACE2 receptors, than to the receptors of any other animal.

This pointed to the fact, as he says, that it could have been a recombination event in nature where two viruses infect an animal host at the same time, and combine to produce a new virus. Or, that same recombination event could have happened in a cell culture in a laboratory. Nikolai Petrovsky produced his paper. He’s a very calm individual, definitely not conservative. He’s been railing against the Morrison Government for not funding his vaccine candidate for COVID-19. He was led by the science. He completed the project with a colleague at La Trobe University. These are not political figures; they were led by the science. They thought there might be difficulty publishing their paper, but they had no idea just how hard it would be. It’s only early this month, June 2021, when the entire public consensus and narrative has changed, that his paper has finally been accepted into a prestigious scientific journal after a year of waiting.

Nikolai Petrovsky says it was like political dynamite to suggest at the time that COVID-19 might have had a laboratory origin, so he tried the pre-print service. The very reason pre-print service exists is to get the science into the public domain while it’s going through the peer review process. Even the pre-print service rejected his paper. And it rejected any other paper that questioned the natural origin of the virus. For my book, I asked the editor-in-chief for those pre-print services why they would do this. Because, in rejecting scientific papers that questioned a natural origin, they were playing into China’s narrative.

When questioned, the co-founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv, John Inglis, admitted that they had refused to publish a small proportion of scientific papers related to the origin of COVID-19. He claimed a small proportion of manuscripts may have harmful consequences if posted in the open on a pre-print server, before peer review. For example, there could be challenges to the safety of standard medical procedures, assertions about substances or encouragements to self-medicate. He added that, because of the frantic pace of new information about the novel coronavirus, it was in the overwhelming public interest. He maintained that this was not a judgement of the investigations concerned, but simply a recognition that pre-print screening must be limited and fast, and certain manuscripts, a very small proportion, should have a more concentrated expert and detailed assessment before being distributed.

As you start to investigate this topic, you can see the cover up, the suppression of science, and the suppression of credible scientists who looked at the genetic sequence, the genome, of this virus and said: It looks like it could be a laboratory construct because it was perfectly designed, it was ready made and adapted to affect humans and there was no other host that had a greater binding affinity. There are other unusual aspects of the virus as well.

These scientists were suppressed. Instead, the scientists that had a 15-year relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, plus financial ties with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, were allowed to freely publish their view even though it lacked evidence and amounted to nothing more than opinion.