Bats, 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. My previous essay, The Laboratory in Wuhan, was very long. In this post, I have written an 1100-word version of the previous post.
This essay examines the unresolved origins of COVID-19, weighing evidence for both natural spillover from bats and the possibility of a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while highlighting the scientific, political, and international complexities that continue to fuel debate.
Globally, over 7.1 million confirmed deaths have been reported to the World Health Organization. However, true total death tolls are estimated to be much higher due to unrecorded cases and indirect effects, with excess mortality models suggesting the real global toll is between 15 million and 35 million people. We still have not settled on the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic.
I want to point out that in The Trump Files: An Account of the Trump Administration’s Effect on American Democracy, Human Rights, Science and Public Health, Part V is devoted to the COVID pandemic. As a resource, this link will take to a free copy of Part V.
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.
Scientists move through caves in southern China searching for bats. They capture them, collect biological samples, identify the viruses they carry, sequence their genetic material, and release the animals.
They are virus hunters.
One of the most accomplished was Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). After the SARS epidemic of 2002–2003, Shi and other scientists spent years studying horseshoe bats, which harbor an extraordinary variety of SARS-related coronaviruses.
The goal was straightforward: find potentially dangerous viruses before they find us.
Then, in late 2019, a coronavirus the world had never seen before appeared in Wuhan.
And the scientific enterprise intended to prevent pandemics became entangled in the greatest pandemic mystery of our time.
Bats, Wuhan and The Trump Files
When I wrote The Trump Files in 2022, I described bats as important reservoir hosts of emerging viruses and wrote:
“Bats are the major hosts for the evolution of the two previous coronaviruses.”
I described what appeared to be the likely ecological pathway: a virus circulating in bats passes through another animal and eventually reaches humans.
I would phrase my conclusion more carefully today.
SARS-CoV-2 belongs to a family of coronaviruses whose deeper evolutionary reservoir is strongly associated with horseshoe bats. But the precise path by which SARS-CoV-2 reached humans remains unresolved.
Why the uncertainty?
Because there was something else in Wuhan.
A major laboratory was studying these viruses.
Wuhan Was Not an Isolated Chinese Laboratory
The Wuhan Institute of Virology dates to 1956 and eventually became one of China’s leading centers of virus research. It also became home to China’s first Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, designed for research involving extremely dangerous pathogens.
But WIV was not operating outside international science.
It was deeply connected to it.
France helped China develop its high-containment research capacity. The Institut Pasteur, CNRS, INSERM participated in scientific exchanges with Wuhan.
The Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch developed a relationship with Wuhan that included biosafety and security training.
Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg also maintained scientific relationships with Chinese researchers and, in 2019, sent Ebola and Nipah virus samples to Wuhan through an officially approved transfer. Those viruses have nothing to do with COVID-19, but the episode illustrates how international the Wuhan laboratory had become.
And then there was the American money.
EcoHealth, NIH and Wuhan
The National Institutes of Health, through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, funded the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance to investigate the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.
EcoHealth subcontracted some of that work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
So American federal money did support bat-coronavirus research at Wuhan.
That is a fact.
But another frequently made claim—that NIH-funded research created SARS-CoV-2—has not been scientifically demonstrated.
Researchers at Wuhan did conduct experiments involving recombinant or chimeric coronaviruses to understand which viral characteristics might allow animal viruses to infect human cells.
That research raises legitimate questions about laboratory safety and so-called gain-of-function research.
How much risk should scientists accept in the laboratory to understand viruses that pose risks in nature?
COVID-19 transformed that scientific and ethical question into a political battlefield.
What Does the Genetic Evidence Say?
After SARS-CoV-2 appeared, Wuhan researchers compared it with bat coronaviruses they had collected.
One, called RaTG13, was about 96 percent genetically identical to SARS-CoV-2. That sounds remarkably close, but evolutionarily the difference is substantial. RaTG13 is a relative, not the immediate ancestor of the pandemic virus.
Scientists also examined SARS-CoV-2 for evidence that someone had deliberately engineered it.
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.
But here is a distinction that often gets lost:
Evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was not deliberately engineered does not rule out every possible laboratory accident.
A naturally occurring virus collected from a bat could theoretically infect a laboratory worker and still look completely natural genetically.
Possible, however, does not mean proven.
The Market Evidence
Another body of evidence points toward Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
Many of the earliest known COVID cases clustered geographically around the market. Environmental samples there contained SARS-CoV-2, and samples from areas associated with wildlife also contained genetic material from susceptible animals, including raccoon dogs.
This is among the strongest evidence supporting a natural animal-to-human spillover.
The World Health Organization revisited the origin question in 2025, and its Scientific Advisory Group concluded that the weight of available scientific evidence favors zoonotic spillover, either directly from bats or through an intermediate animal.
But WHO did not eliminate the laboratory hypothesis.
China has not supplied all the information investigators have requested, including important laboratory and early-outbreak records.
That missing evidence matters.
It does not prove a lab leak.
It prevents investigators from conclusively ruling one out.
Science Meets Politics
American intelligence agencies themselves disagree.
Some have favored natural emergence. The FBI and Department of Energy have leaned toward a research-related origin, generally with limited confidence.
In June 2026, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went considerably further, asserting that U.S.-funded Wuhan research caused the pandemic and accusing Anthony Fauci and others of concealing evidence.
Those are extraordinary accusations.
But an intelligence assertion—even one published by the United States government—is not equivalent to reproducible scientific evidence.
This is where the origins debate echoes a larger theme of The Trump Files.
During the pandemic, Donald Trump repeatedly turned scientific questions into political weapons. Masks, vaccines, hydroxychloroquine, China and Anthony Fauci became symbols of political identity. If you want explore this in more detail, here a link to Part V of The Trump Files that examines the failed policies of the Trump Adminstration during COVID.
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.
Lab Leak or Conspiracy Theory?
We should make one final distinction.
Claims that China deliberately engineered SARS-CoV-2 as a biological weapon and intentionally released it have not been supported by evidence.
But the narrower hypothesis that a researcher could have become accidentally infected by a naturally occurring coronavirus is not inherently a conspiracy theory.
Laboratory accidents happen.
Such a possibility deserves investigation.
But possibility is not probability.
Suspicion is not evidence. Proximity is not causation.
The strongest scientific evidence presently favors natural spillover. Yet important information remains unavailable, leaving the laboratory hypothesis unresolved.
And that brings us to the larger lesson of Wuhan.
Scientists went into caves because they wanted to protect us from future pandemics. They collected viruses, sequenced them, studied them and shared information across international borders.
Chinese, American, French and Canadian scientists participated in that global enterprise.
The purpose was to make us safer.
But studying dangerous viruses can itself create risks.
That paradox is at the heart of the Wuhan story.
Six years after COVID-19 emerged, we know that the bats were real, the laboratory was real, the American funding was real, the international collaborations were real, and the evidence connecting the early outbreak to the Huanan market is real.
The missing records are real, too.
What we still lack is the final chain of evidence connecting SARS-CoV-2 from its immediate biological ancestor to the first infected human.
Until we do, the responsible answer is neither accusation nor exoneration.
It is investigation.
Final Note:
The blog post discussed the unresolved origins of COVID-19, exploring two main hypotheses: natural spillover from bats and a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Despite significant global death tolls, the true origins remain enigmatic. It highlights the importance of international scientific collaboration and notes the role of American funding in related research. Key evidence suggests natural spillover, particularly linked to the Huanan Seafood Market, though laboratory hypotheses persist. Ultimately, the post underscores the need for continued investigation because records are missing and emphasizes that both possibilities warrant careful consideration.
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