Nearly three years have passed since Chinese officials advised the World Health Organization they had identified several cases of a mysterious new virus spreading among residents of Wuhan, the largest city in Hubei Province.
Laying the groundwork for what would ultimately become the Chinese government’s defense for unleashing this terrible plague upon the planet, officials closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a wet market in Wuhan, where they claimed the virus may have originated.
They theorized that what soon became known as the 2019 Novel Coronavirus may have jumped from an animal to a human at the market; that in technical terms, it had a zoonotic origin.
There was perhaps no greater proponent of the zoonotic origin theory than the ubiquitous Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
As cases multiplied throughout the world, another theory for the origin of the virus began to take root. Some thought it was possible the virus may have escaped from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety Level 4 laboratory that specializes in coronaviruses. Because “gain-of-function research” was being conducted at this facility, the virus may have been enhanced (artificially intensified, made more lethal) during their experiments and may have accidentally leaked from the lab. These individuals were quickly labeled as conspiracy theorists.
China, as we know, has repeatedly refused to truly cooperate with investigations into the origins of the coronavirus.
According to a June report in the U.K. Daily Mail, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, voiced his own fears to a European politician that the virus was leaked from the Wuhan lab in “a catastrophic accident” in 2019.
Dr. Andrew Huff, who was employed by the now-notorious research organization the EcoHealth Alliance from 2014-2016 and named its vice president in 2015, has now come forward as a whistleblower. He provided an exclusive pre-release copy of his new book, “The Truth About Wuhan,” to the U.K. media outlet The Sun.
In an interview about the book published by The Sun on Saturday, Huff, an Army veteran from Michigan, said he worked on the “classified side of the research program as a US government scientist.”
Shockingly, he declared that “China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent.” He claimed that COVID-19 was genetically engineered and that it leaked from the Wuhan lab.
He blames the pandemic on U.S. funding of gain-of-function research in China, telling the Sun, “The U.S. government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese.”
Huff charged that we have witnessed “one of the greatest cover-ups in history” and called it the “biggest U.S. intelligence failure since 9/11.”
In his book, Huff, an epidemiologist, wrote that the lax safety standards practiced at the U.S.-funded Wuhan lab were responsible for the leak, according to The Sun.
“EcoHealth Alliance and foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he wrote, according to The Sun.
Huff wrote that his organization had “taught” scientists at the Wuhan lab the “best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species. … I was terrified by what I saw. We were just handing them bioweapon technology.”
“Nobody should be surprised that the Chinese lied about the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 and then went to extraordinary lengths to make it appear as if the disease naturally emerged,” Huff told the Sun.
Huff left EcoHealth Alliance in 2016. According to The Sun, Huff said it was “due to a large number of ethical concerns with the scientific work and EcoHealth Alliance as a whole.”
Huff said he has not seen any evidence that the Chinese deliberately leaked the virus.
However, he does claim that the U.S. government knew about it months earlier than the generally accepted time of December 2019 or January 2020, according to The Sun.
He says he has “has good reason to believe that the US government was alerted to the outbreak in August or October 2019.”
He said he suspects his knowledge of the virus situation led to an unexpected job offer in late 2019 from the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which he now says was designed to put him in a position where he could be muzzled by the government.
“It is my belief that people working within the US government potentially identified me as a risk to knowing firsthand that the SARS-CoV-2 disease emergence event was a consequence of the US government’s sponsorship of the genetic engineering of SARS-CoV-2 domestically and abroad,” he wrote in his book, according to The Sun.
“If I would have accepted the position, then I suspect that DARPA would have disclosed restricted information to me, which would have consequently prevented me from discussing any of this information publicly, like I have been and am doing now.”
According to The Sun, he said his work to uncover the origins of COVID had led to him being made a target for harassment. He said he had seen military-grade drones over his home, that he’d been “stalked” in a supermarket, and followed by unknown vehicles.
He is now suing EcoHealth Alliance, according to The Sun.
EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, a crony of Fauci, lobbied hard in the early days of the pandemic to squash the beliefs that it could have originated from lab leak.
After a June 2021 release of over 3,200 pages of Fauci’s emails from the first six months of the pandemic, we learned that Daszak emailed Fauci on April 18, 2020, to thank him for dismissing the theory that the coronavirus may have escaped from a lab.
Daszak wrote: “I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Daszak was also the writer and organizer of a statement signed by 27 public health scientists that was published in the elite medical journal The Lancet on Feb. 19, 2020. The letter effectively shut down debate over the origins of the pandemic.
It read in part: “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
This letter did more than anything else to turn the tide away from the idea that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab.
However, as time goes on, a growing volume of circumstantial evidence supports the lab leak theory. Despite President Joe Biden’s unwillingness to stand up to China, the forthcoming Republican-controlled House of Representatives has promised to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
China needs to be held accountable for its role. Even though the leak might have been an accident, rather than alerting the WHO immediately and doing everything in their power to stop the spread of the virus, the Chinese chose to mislead us and allowed COVID-19 to infect the world.
They must be forced to face the consequences for their deadly decisions, and officials in the U.S. must answer for funding dangerous, gain-of-function research in a country that is bound and determined to destroy us.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.