The Laboratory in Wuhan

Bats, viruses, American money, international science—and the COVID mystery that refuses to disappear.

Welcome to Citizen Jack’s Mud Creek Chronicles. If you are new to my blog, thank you for joining us. I’ve been thinking about how Anthony Fauci is being treated by a small group of Republicans. Fauci became a symbol of federal pandemic response, public health mandates, and scientific authority, making him a target for political blame, especially among Republicans and critics of pandemic restrictions. The conflict has evolved from a scientific inquiry into a political trial, with Fauci portrayed as a scapegoat for broader frustrations with the pandemic and government response.

In summary, the Fauci-Rand Paul conflict is a highly politicized dispute over the origins of COVID-19, the definition and oversight of risky research, and the role of public health officials. While Paul has raised legitimate questions about research oversight, his broader accusations against Fauci remain unproven, and the debate has become emblematic of deeper political and societal divisions over science and accountability during the pandemic.

Although Fauci was charged with contempt of Congress, those attacking Fauci started out with the lab leak as their preferred cause of the pandemic. There is no evidence for the lab leak, but its still on the table as you find out ahead. At the center of this controversy are bats and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In this essay, I explore the Wuhan Institute, including its work, history, and role in our understanding of viruses, especially coronaviruses.

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There is a scene I keep returning to when I think about the origins of COVID-19.

It does not begin in a laboratory.

It begins in a cave.

They are looking for the next pandemic before another pandemic finds us.

One of the most accomplished of these researchers was Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who became internationally known for her research on bat coronaviruses.

Long before COVID-19 appeared, Shi and her colleagues were asking one of the most consequential questions in infectious-disease science:

What viruses are circulating in wild animals that might someday jump into human beings?

She explored that question in a 2019 paper titled Bat Viruses in China. In this review, the authors collected information from past epidemiology studies on bat coronaviruses in China, including the virus species identified, their host species, and their geographical distributions. We also discuss the future prospects of bat coronaviruses cross-species transmission and spread in China.

It was not an unreasonable question.

It was exactly the question scientists should have been asking. Here we note that scientists in China were trying to answer that question.

The original SARS outbreak of 2002–2003 had already shown that dangerous coronaviruses could emerge from animals. Bats, particularly horseshoe bats, turned out to harbor an astonishing variety of SARS-related coronaviruses.

Researchers wanted to know what else was out there.

So they went looking.

Years later, a coronavirus the world had never seen before appeared in Wuhan.

And the scientific enterprise that had been designed to prevent pandemics became entangled in the greatest pandemic mystery of our time.

• Did SARS-CoV-2 come naturally from animals?
• Did a naturally occurring virus collected during research somehow escape from a laboratory?
• Did research itself create or modify a virus that eventually escaped?

Those are three different questions.

They have too often been treated as if they were one.

And six years after the outbreak began, we still don’t have a final answer.

I Wrote About the Bats Before I Wrote About the Lab

When I wrote The Trump Files in 2022, I was interested in the ecology of emerging infectious diseases and in what scientists had already learned about bats.

Here is what I said:

“One of the most significant spillover species is bats.”

I discussed research describing bats as important reservoir hosts for emerging viruses and noted their connection to both SARS and MERS. I also described the early attention being given to Wuhan’s wet markets, where live and recently slaughtered animals could create opportunities for viruses to move among wildlife, domestic animals and humans.

At the time I wrote:

“Bats are the major hosts for the evolution of the two previous coronaviruses.”

And I described what then seemed like the obvious ecological pathway: a virus circulating among bats moves into another animal and eventually into humans.

That remains a powerful explanation for COVID-19.

But there was something else in Wuhan.

There was a laboratory devoted to studying exactly these viruses.

And that fact turned an ecological mystery into a scientific, political, and geopolitical one.

The Institute

The Wuhan Institute of Virology did not suddenly appear with COVID-19.

Eventually, Wuhan became home to China’s first Biosafety Level 4 laboratory.

A BSL-4 laboratory occupies the highest category of biological containment. These facilities are designed for work involving extremely dangerous pathogens for which infection may have devastating consequences.

But the Wuhan laboratory was not simply a Chinese project hidden behind the walls of an authoritarian state.Its development was connected to international science.

Franco-Chinese Connection

France played a significant role in China’s development of high-containment research. French and Chinese scientific organizations developed collaborations involving infectious-disease research and the Wuhan P4 laboratory.

In July 2016, the Institut Pasteur hosted a Franco-Chinese symposium on emerging infectious diseases. More than twenty scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Institut Pasteur, CNRS, INSERM and other organizations participated. Institut Pasteur explicitly described the meeting as promoting projects associated with the Wuhan P4 laboratory.

There were strong connections between Wuhan and Canada and the United States. Wuhan collaborated with Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg. The Wuhan Institute of Virology received U.S. funding through a subaward from a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” (Grant No. R01AI110964). The primary grantee was the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which funneled roughly $600,000 of the multi-million dollar award to the Wuhan lab and East China Normal University.

This is an important part of the Wuhan story and the China story.

Before COVID-19, scientists did not generally regard the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a rogue laboratory.

• They collaborated with it.
• They trained its scientists.
• They published papers together.
• They funded research together.

They believed that international cooperation was one of our best defenses against emerging disease.

The Bat Hunters

Shi Zhengli became one of the world’s leading researchers on bat coronaviruses.

Following the first SARS epidemic, Shi and other scientists traveled extensively through China, collecting samples from bats and searching for relatives of the SARS virus. In 2017, Shi and her colleague Cui Jie discovered that the SARS coronavirus likely originated in a population of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan.

Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai in 2019 and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”²

Their work produced an increasingly detailed map of an invisible viral ecosystem.

A bat cave can contain more biological information than any scientist could possibly observe by looking at the animals themselves. Inside their bodies exist viruses with genomes that have been evolving for centuries.⁴

Most will never infect humans.

Some might.

• The challenge is figuring out which ones.
• This was the scientific rationale behind virus surveillance.
• Find viruses in nature.
• Sequence them.
• Determine which receptors they can use.
• Investigate whether they can infect human cells.
• Study what genetic changes might enable them to cross the species barrier.

Ideally, scientists would identify the dangerous viruses before those viruses emerged into human populations.

But here the scientific story becomes more complicated.

Researchers did not simply catalogue viruses.

In some studies, scientists constructed recombinant or chimeric viruses—viruses containing genetic components from different viruses—to test what particular genes or spike proteins allowed them to infect cells.

A 2015 Nature Medicine study⁵ involving researchers from the United States and Shi Zhengli’s Wuhan group used a chimeric SARS-like coronavirus⁶ to investigate the potential for bat coronaviruses to emerge in humans.⁷ The journal later added an editor’s note emphasizing that the paper had been used to support unverified claims that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered and that there was no evidence the experiment had produced the pandemic virus.

Gain of Function (GOF)

This is where the phrase gain of function (GOF) entered popular political vocabulary. Gain-of-function (GOF) refers to any genetic change—either occurring naturally or made through lab experiments—that gives an organism a new trait or a stronger version of an old trait. In virology and medicine, it often means changing a virus or bacterium to study how it grows, spreads, or causes sickness⁸

Unfortunately, the phrase often generates more heat than light.

Scientists, government agencies and critics have not always used the term in precisely the same way.

Dr. Anthony Fauci consistently stated under oath that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) never funded “gain-of-function” (GOF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He maintained that U.S.-backed grants to the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance were used strictly for surveillance and studying naturally occurring bat coronaviruses, and that these funded studies could not have served as a precursor to SARS-CoV-2. Republican members of a Senate subcommittee have challenged Fauci’s truthfulness. The evidence does not support the political view. GOF is much more complicated than senators state.

But the underlying issue is straightforward.

When scientists alter a virus in order to discover what genetic changes allow it to infect cells, reproduce more effectively or move between species, they may learn something enormously valuable.

They may also create risks.

The scientific question is therefore inseparable from an ethical one:

How much risk should we accept in the laboratory in order to understand risks that already exist in nature?

A very good report on issues surrounding GOF is available in the National Library of Medicine and summarizes Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Research: Summary of a Workshop.⁹

COVID-19 transformed that theoretical argument into a global controversy.

The American Connection

The Wuhan Institute’s coronavirus work was connected to the United States through a nonprofit organization called EcoHealth Alliance.

For years, EcoHealth Alliance, headed by zoologist Peter Daszak, studied the possibility that viruses circulating among wildlife could spill over into people.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, awarded EcoHealth funding for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.“

Some of that money went through EcoHealth to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

There is nothing speculative about this part of the story.

American federal money supported research on bat coronaviruses conducted with Wuhan scientists.

NIH’s own records document the grant, and NIH subsequently released extensive grant materials through its Freedom of Information Act library.

EcoHealth says the research examined coronavirus diversity, spillover risks, receptor binding and whether certain bat coronaviruses could infect cells and laboratory animals. Its own description acknowledges experiments involving recombinant bat coronaviruses carrying spike proteins from other bat coronaviruses. EcoHealth argues that the research complied with NIH requirements and did not constitute prohibited gain-of-function research.

NIH, meanwhile, has maintained that the viruses studied under the grant were genetically too distant from SARS-CoV-2 to have been its source.

That distinction is crucial.

NIH money helped support bat-coronavirus research at Wuhan.

That is a fact.

NIH-funded research created SARS-CoV-2.

That is a much larger claim, and it has not been scientifically demonstrated.

The history of EcoHealth nevertheless became increasingly troubling for other reasons.

Questions arose about reporting requirements, oversight and experiments conducted under the grant. In January 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services formally debarred EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak from receiving federal funding for five years. The government’s action concerned grant compliance and oversight; it did not establish that EcoHealth or Wuhan created SARS-CoV-2.

The distinction is worth repeating because this entire controversy depends upon distinctions.

Bad oversight does not prove a lab leak.

A lab leak would not necessarily prove genetic engineering.

Genetic experimentation would not prove that the experiment produced SARS-CoV-2.

But neither should problems in oversight be ignored simply because some of the people raising questions have made exaggerated claims.

Wuhan, Texas, France and Canada

There is another aspect of this story that has received far less attention than it deserves.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was not operating outside international science.

It was embedded in it.

Consider Texas.

The Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch is one of America’s major high-containment laboratories.

Galveston says its relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology dates to 2013. Its Biosafety Training Center provided laboratory safety and security training to scientists and operations personnel from more than forty-five countries, including China. The relationship with Wuhan developed through scientific exchanges involving the Chinese and U.S. academies of science and other organizations.

Or consider Canada.

Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg is another BSL-4 facility.

In 2019, following a request from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Canada sent samples of Ebola and Nipah viruses to Wuhan for scientific research.

The transfer has generated years of suspicion because two scientists at the Canadian laboratory, Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng, subsequently lost their security clearances and employment.

But Canadian authorities have explicitly said that the virus transfer followed established approval procedures and was not connected to the departure of those employees.

And Ebola and Nipah viruses are not coronaviruses.

They did not cause COVID-19.

Why mention them?

Because they reveal what Wuhan was before the pandemic transformed its reputation.

It was part of a global scientific network in which dangerous pathogens, genetic information, expertise and researchers moved across national boundaries.

• France was involved.
• Canada was involved.
• Texas was involved.
• NIH was involved indirectly through EcoHealth.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was not standing outside the gates of international science.

It was inside them. It was a global network (Figure 5)

And Then a Virus Appeared in Wuhan

Late in 2019, physicians in Wuhan began encountering patients suffering from a strange pneumonia. Scientists soon identified a new coronavirus. The virus became SARS-CoV-2.

The disease became COVID-19.

Shi Zhengli and her colleagues compared the newly identified virus against bat coronaviruses in their collection.

One in particular attracted worldwide attention.

RaTG13.

Its genome was about 96 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2. Ninety-six percent sounds almost identical.

But viruses evolve quickly enough that the remaining difference is substantial. RaTG13 is a relative of SARS-CoV-2, not its immediate parent.

In late 2024, Shi disclosed sequences from dozens of additional bat coronaviruses collected by her group. According to the data she presented, none was a sufficiently close relative to represent the immediate ancestor of SARS-CoV-2.

That does not prove that every virus ever collected by Wuhan has been disclosed.

It tells us something narrower but important:

Among the viruses that have been made known, scientists have not identified the virus from which SARS-CoV-2 could simply have been constructed or descended directly.

What Does the Genetic Code Tell Us?

Soon after the pandemic began, scientists examined the SARS-CoV-2 genome for evidence of engineering.

A highly influential paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 concluded that SARS-CoV-2 was not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

The authors pointed to features of its receptor-binding domain and its genetic backbone as evidence of natural evolutionary processes rather than deliberate design.

That remains an important finding.

But it has sometimes been asked to answer a question it cannot answer.

• Suppose researchers collected a naturally occurring virus from a bat.
• Suppose that virus was brought into a laboratory.
• Suppose a researcher became infected.
• And suppose the infection then spread outside the laboratory.

The virus would still look natural.

There would be no genetic engineering signature because the virus had never been engineered.

Thus:

Evidence against deliberate genetic construction is not evidence against every possible laboratory accident.

That distinction should have been clear from the beginning.

Instead, arguments about the origin of COVID hardened into opposing camps. One side sometimes treated any discussion of Wuhan as a conspiracy theory. The other sometimes treated Wuhan’s existence as proof of guilt.

Science requires something better from us.

The Market

There is substantial evidence pointing somewhere other than the laboratory.

It points toward the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

Researchers mapping the earliest known COVID-19 cases found that they were geographically concentrated around the market, including cases in people who were not known to have worked or shopped there.

A major Science study concluded that the market was the early epicenter of the pandemic and that SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged through the live-wildlife trade.

The evidence became more interesting when scientists reanalyzed genetic material collected from the market.

Environmental samples containing SARS-CoV-2 also contained DNA from animals known to be susceptible to the virus, including raccoon dogs.

A 2024 Cell study strengthened the evidence that susceptible wildlife had been present in precisely the areas of the market where SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples were collected.¹⁰

None of this gives us the proverbial smoking gun.

No scientist has produced an infected raccoon dog sampled in December 2019 carrying the immediate ancestor of SARS-CoV-2.

But epidemiology rarely hands investigators a signed confession.

Instead, scientists reconstruct events from patterns.

And the geographic and genetic patterns surrounding the Huanan market are among the strongest pieces of evidence for natural spillover.

What Does the Scientific Community Think?

There is no single “scientific community” position delivered by unanimous vote.

But the published scientific evidence has leaned strongly toward a zoonotic origin.

In The Trump Files (2022), I reviewed the first World Health Organization report. Here is what I said about this WHO study of coronavirus.

In January 2021, a WHO international scientific and collaborative mission traveled to China and worked with scientists there for four weeks to investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The report, WHO-Convened Global Study of Origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part, was published in March 2021.

According to the report, it’s highly unlikely that the coronavirus escaped from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Most scientists involved in the study say the evidence favors SARS-CoV-2 spilling over from animals into humans. However, a few still back the idea that the virus was intentionally or accidentally leaked from a lab. When the team visited the virology lab, they found no workers with antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, which rules out the idea that someone there had been infected and then spread the virus. However, it’s been reported that three workers at the lab fell sick in November 2019 and had to be hospitalized. They had COVID-19-like or seasonal symptoms. Because of the scrutiny by the Chinese government during their time in Wuhan, some scientists went on record saying they wouldn’t trust the outcome of the investigation. The WHO-led team had little power to conduct a thorough and impartial study of the virus’s origins. The Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, a decision that made it difficult to have American scientists as part of the WHO-led team to China. Although some American names were put forward, none were ever extended an invitation to join the WHO team

Source: Jack Hassard, The Trump Files, Marietta: Northington-Hearn, 2022

The WHO joint team postulated the following as the likelihood of each pathway:

• 1. Direct zoonotic spillover is a possible to likely pathway.
• 2. Introduction through an intermediate host is a likely to very likely pathway.
• 3. Introduction through (cold) food chain products is considered a possible pathway.
• 4. Introduction through a laboratory incident is an extremely unlikely pathway.

That conclusion was reaffirmed by the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens in June 2025.

After examining peer-reviewed research, reports, intelligence assessments and other evidence, the group concluded that the weight of available evidence suggests zoonotic spillover, either directly from bats or through an intermediate animal.

That sounds conclusive.

It isn’t.

Because the WHO immediately added something extraordinarily important.

China has not provided all the information investigators have requested.

Among the missing information are hundreds of viral sequences from early COVID cases, detailed information on animals sold in Wuhan markets, and information concerning research and biosafety conditions at laboratories in Wuhan.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus therefore said in June 2025 that all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and a laboratory leak.

This is where I think much public discussion goes wrong.

The scientific position is not:

“We know it came from the market.”

Nor is it:

“We know it escaped from Wuhan.”

It is closer to this:

The strongest currently available scientific evidence supports animal-to-human emergence, but the absence of critical records prevents the laboratory hypothesis from being fully evaluated and excluded.

That is a less satisfying answer.

It is also a more scientific one.

Then Came the Intelligence Agencies

American intelligence agencies have not reached the same conclusion among themselves. In the Trump Files I reviewed these reports, and said this:

On May 26, 2021, President Biden ordered a ninety-day US Intelligence Community investigation into where the SARS-CoV-2 came from. The Intelligence Community report, which consisted of several teams of investigators, concluded that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.

Source: Jack Hassard, The Trump Files, Marietta: Northington-Hearn, 2022

Some agencies have favored natural emergence.

Others have favored a research-related incident.

The FBI has leaned toward a laboratory origin. The Department of Energy has also leaned in that direction.

Their confidence levels have generally been limited rather than absolute.

A 2023 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence examined possible connections between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the pandemic, but did not produce conclusive proof that resolved the origin question.

Then, in June 2026, the story took another turn.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released newly declassified documents and accused Anthony Fauci and other government officials of suppressing evidence surrounding COVID’s origins. Then a report was published entitled Tulsi Gabbard’s Fauci Files Don’t Prove What She Says They Prove. Here is what the authors said about Gabbard’s fake news.¹¹

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) went much further than the WHO scientific review, declaring that U.S.-funded coronavirus work at Wuhan was “widely viewed” as the source of an unintentional laboratory leak and asserting that Fauci-funded Wuhan research sparked COVID.

No such research was ever done outside the Institute.

Those are extraordinary accusations.

But extraordinary accusations should not become scientific facts merely because they appear on an official government website.

The documents deserve examination.

So do the government’s interpretation of them and the possibility that previously withheld intelligence changes what we know.

But an intelligence assertion—even an official one—is not the same thing as reproducible scientific evidence demonstrating the path by which SARS-CoV-2 entered the human population.

This is particularly important in the Trump era.

Government agencies do not operate outside politics.

Neither, for that matter, do universities, scientific institutions or international organizations.

That does not mean their findings should be dismissed.

It means their claims should be tested against evidence.

That principle runs throughout The Trump Files.

During the pandemic, Donald Trump repeatedly turned scientific questions into political weapons. Masks, hydroxychloroquine, vaccines, lockdowns, Anthony Fauci, China and the virus itself became components of political identity.

The origins question suffered the same fate.

Instead of asking What does the evidence show?, Americans increasingly asked Whose side are you on?

That is poison to scientific thinking.

Was “Lab Leak” a Conspiracy Theory?

This question deserves a better answer than either political camp has usually given it.

Some claims unquestionably were conspiracy theories.

The claim that China deliberately engineered SARS-CoV-2 as a biological weapon and intentionally released it requires evidence that has never been produced publicly.

Claims of elaborate global plots involving scientists, pharmaceutical companies and governments likewise outran the evidence.

But consider a much narrower proposition:

A scientist collects a naturally occurring bat coronavirus.

The virus enters a laboratory.

Someone becomes accidentally infected.

The infection moves into the surrounding community.

There is nothing inherently conspiratorial about that scenario.

Laboratory infections have happened before.

Scientific institutions therefore have an obligation to investigate such possibilities.

A hypothesis does not become a conspiracy theory simply because politicians misuse it.

But the reverse is equally important.

A hypothesis does not become true simply because it is possible.

Possibility is not probability.

Suspicion is not evidence.

And proximity is not causation.

The Question I Would Ask Now

Looking back at what I wrote in The Trump Files, I would change one sentence.

In 2022, I wrote that SARS-CoV-2 “originated in bats.”

I would phrase that more carefully today.

I would say that SARS-CoV-2 belongs to a family of coronaviruses whose deeper evolutionary reservoir is strongly associated with horseshoe bats, while the precise path by which the pandemic virus reached humans remains unresolved.

That change may look small.

It represents something fundamental about science.

Scientific conclusions are provisional.

We say what the evidence permits us to say.

Then we change our language when the evidence changes.

Politicians have a much harder time doing that.

The Real Wuhan Story

The most important lesson of the Wuhan Institute of Virology may ultimately have little to do with proving a laboratory leak.

The institute reveals a paradox at the center of modern pandemic science.

To prevent dangerous viruses from surprising us, scientists search for them.

• They enter caves.
• They capture bats.
• They collect samples.
• They sequence viral genomes.
• They move samples into laboratories.
• They sometimes manipulate viral genes to understand how viruses cross biological barriers.
• And they share samples, techniques and data across international borders.

Furthermore:

• China did this.
• American scientists did it.
• French scientists did it.
• Canadian scientists did it.
• EcoHealth Alliance participated in it.
• NIH helped finance some of it.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology became one node in that global scientific network.

The purpose was to make us safer.

But every intervention into nature creates another question.

At what point does studying a dangerous virus create a danger of its own?

That question remains even if an infected animal at the Huanan market is someday conclusively identified as the source of SARS-CoV-2.

And it becomes even more urgent if evidence someday establishes that COVID-19 resulted from a research-related accident.

Either way, the lesson is not that we should stop studying emerging viruses.

Quite the opposite.

The lesson is that research involving potential pandemic pathogens demands exceptional transparency, international oversight and accountability.

The Evidence We Still Don’t Have

There is a final irony.

We possess the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2.

We have sequenced viruses from bats thousands of miles away.

And we can reconstruct evolutionary relationships among microscopic organisms that existed years before the pandemic.

We can detect traces of raccoon-dog DNA in environmental samples collected from a Wuhan market in January 2020.

And yet we still lack some of the most basic records necessary to reconstruct what happened in Wuhan during the months before the world changed.

• What viruses had been collected?
• What experiments were underway?
• Who had access to them?
• Were any laboratory workers sick?
• What happened among animals being transported through China’s wildlife trade?
• What were the earliest human infections?

China’s failure to provide complete information has not proved a laboratory leak.

It has ensured that suspicion survives.

And that may be the central tragedy of the Wuhan story.

Science advances by making evidence available for others to examine. We have seen in this paper that scientists at the Institute do indeed publish their findings in international journals.

Conspiracy theories flourish where evidence disappears. Conspiracy theorists do not read journals and have no idea what scientists do and how they report their results.

Between them lies uncertainty.

Six years after COVID-19 emerged, that is where we remain.

• The bats are real.
• The market is real.
• The laboratory is real.
• The American funding is real.
• The international collaborations are real.
• The genetic evidence for natural evolution is real.
• The evidence connecting the early outbreak to the Huanan market is real.
• The missing records are real.

What we do not possess is the final chain of evidence connecting SARS-CoV-2 from its immediate biological ancestor to the first infected human being.

What should we do?

Until we do, the responsible answer to the Wuhan question is neither accusation nor exoneration.

It is investigation.

And perhaps that is what we should have demanded from the beginning.

Final Note:

The ongoing debate surrounding the origins of COVID-19 centers on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the role of bats in virus transmission. Critics, particularly Republicans, view Fauci as a scapegoat for pandemic failures, while legitimate scientific discourse over research oversight has evolved into politicized conflict. Evidence points to a potential natural spillover at the Huanan market, but some still consider the lab leak theory, despite a lack of conclusive proof. Ultimately, the need for transparency and thorough investigation remains crucial to resolving the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Footnotes

1. For the research paper, see: Wang, Ning (2018). “Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infection in Humans, China” (PDF). Virologica Sinica. 33 (1): 104–107. doi:10.1007/s12250-018-0012-7. PMC 6178078. PMID 29500691.
   
   For English news coverage, see: “Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur”. Nature. 1 December 2017.
   
   For a more detailed news coverage in Chinese, see: The Beijing News . 26 February 2020.e ↩︎
2. “Chasing Plagues” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 322 No. 6 (June 2020), p. 24
   doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0620-24 ↩︎
3. Han, Y., Xu, P., Wang, Y. et al. Panoramic analysis of coronaviruses carried by representative bat species in Southern China to better understand the coronavirus sphere. Nat Commun 14, 5537 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41264-z ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Menachery, V., Yount, B., Debbink, K. et al. A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. Nat Med 21, 1508–1513 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3985 ↩︎
6. A chimeric SARS-like coronavirus is a laboratory-created hybrid virus combining genetic material from different coronavirus strains—typically merging the surface spike protein of a zoonotic bat coronavirus with the backbone of a mouse-adapted or epidemic SARS virus. Scientists use these chimeras to evaluate cross-species transmission risks and test medical countermeasures ↩︎
7. Menachery, V., Yount, B., Debbink, K. et al. A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. Nat Med 21, 1508–1513 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3985 ↩︎
8. Gain-of-function (GOF) refers to any genetic change—either occurring naturally or made through lab experiments—that gives an organism a new trait or a stronger version of an old trait. In virology and medicine, it often means changing a virus or bacterium to study how it grows, spreads, or causes sickness. National Institutes of Health ↩︎
9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/ ↩︎
10. Many of the earliest known cases of COVID-19 worked at or visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (“Huanan market”) in the city of Wuhan, a link first made by clinicians at different hospitals throughout the city. Retrospective review of early COVID-19 cases identified 174 patients with onset in December 2019, 32% of whom had an ascertained link to this location, within a city of over 12 million. ↩︎
11. The origins of COVID-19 remain uncertain. A lab-associated incident is plausible; so is natural spillover. China’s obstruction has made the truth harder to establish, and scientific opinions vary. There are legitimate questions to ask, in general, about biosafety and U.S.-funded research abroad. But Gabbard isn’t asking those questions. Her press release implies that the debate is over—that the definitive answer is a lab leak—and then uses the assumed conclusion as the foundation for a far more sweeping allegation: that Fauci “sparked COVID” and covered it up. 
    Gabbard’s “Fauci Files” follow the same playbook as her past document drops: Put the desired conclusion in the headline. Use “declassification” as a credibility signal. Present a large, mixed dump of documents as if they were a prosecutor’s exhibit. Convert ordinary government processes—expert consultation, grant oversight, whistleblower routing, intelligence disagreement—into evidence of conspiracy. Then push the accusation on social media, where few people will read the underlying documents closely enough to notice the gulf between the documents and the claims.  ↩︎