The New York Times has come a long way from initially dismissing the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a laboratory as a “fringe” “conspiracy theory” to now publishing a featured opinion piece arguing that “a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.”
The article, published today, is written by Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist who has been at the forefront of the public debate about the virus’s origin and who co-authored the book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Her Times article is titled “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points“.
Wonderful to see in the New York Times of all places, Chan argues that “the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.”
And it was funded by the US government; specifically, it was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its subagency the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) then headed up by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
As I detailed in my article “The Origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the Raccoon Dog Deception“, Fauci was involved in an orchestrated coverup of the probable lab origin. He faces Congress today to testify before a House subcommittee investigating the origin of the pandemic.
The mainstream media, of course, dutifully complied with the attempted coverup with their mindless dismissals of a legitimate scientific hypothesis as a baseless “conspiracy theory” — and the New York Times was no exception.
But the evidence favoring a lab origin is strong, and the evidence favoring a natural spillover event is extraordinarily weak, and this reality could not remain forever ignorable by the thought-controllers.
Chan summarizes five key facts about the virus’s origin:
- The COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Wuhan, where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is located, where scientists were known to have been hunting for SARS-like viruses and conducting experiments on those coronaviruses, while the closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 found in the wild are found in bats living 1,000 miles away from Wuhan.
- The year before the outbreak, the NIH-funded organization EcoHealth Alliance proposed working with Wuhan lab researchers to engineer a SARS-like coronavirus with a spike protein containing a “furin cleavage site”, which happens to be a feature of SARS-CoV-2 that enhances its infectiousness in humans and is unique to SARS-CoV-2 among all known SARS-like coronaviruses.
- Researchers at the Wuhan lab were known to have conducted risky experiments “under inappropriately low biosafety conditions”, including one NIH-funded experiment in which a SARS-like coronavirus was genetically engineered that “exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice” (which is a type of experiment known as “gain of function” research, notwithstanding Fauci perjuring himself before Congress by falsely testifying that the NIH had never funded gain of function research at the Wuhan lab).
- The natural spillover hypothesis, according to which humans became infected by SARS-CoV-2 from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, “is not supported by strong evidence”, and the evidence rather indicates that “the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.”
- “Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing”, including the fact that the earliest known cases were not exposed to live animals, no infected animals were ever found, and no ancestral variants of SARS-CoV-2 have been found in animals.
Chan posted this comment about her purpose in writing the article on Twitter:
The raccoon dog argument was so weak that New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells described it as “Bad Science” that inexplicably got “hyped” as “The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic”, to quote the headline of an Atlantic article that first reported the finding of racoon dog DNA in samples collected from the market.
The lack of evidence was the focus of my article on the claim that the pandemic originated with a raccoon dog at the Huanan wet market, in which I demonstrate that the claim made by leading proponents of the natural spillover hypothesis — including individuals who colluded with Fauci in the coverup — that it was a proven fact that raccoon dogs were being sold at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan at the time of the COVID-19 outbreak was an elaborate hoax.
