I have never understood why certain groups of scientists boisterously denounce the possibility that Covid-19 might have been genetically engineered by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Are they blind? After all, that laboratory is located in the very city where the virus was first discovered, and that laboratory was known to be investigating dangerous varieties of coronavirus.

Two letters, one in the medical journal, Lancet, and the other in Nature Medicine, seem to have satisfied most of the press, along with others, that the virus evolved in nature. Accordingly, major newspapers have churned out articles claiming the virus jumped from bats, or whatever, to humans. And good old Facebook, that exemplary arbitrator of truth, even banned content suggesting the deadly coronavirus might have been manmade, a course it recently reversed.

The wind shifted after many of Anthony Fauci’s emails were made public, quite a few of them heavily redacted but still informative, and after Joe Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to review what is known about the origins of Covid-19.

These new developments prompted me to look deeper into this quagmire. I barely scratched the surface, but I found troubling information.

Key findings

•  From 2014 to2019, our National Institutes of Health sent $3.4 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through an intermediary, the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (more about this entity later). That NIH money was spent on researching bat coronaviruses, and it is widely believed the Wuhan laboratory conducted “gain‑of‑function” research, which in simple terms means intentionally making viruses more virulent.

•  A paper about “gain‑of‑function” research on coronaviruses was sent by Dr. Fauci in a February 2020 email to his deputy Hugh Auchincloss. “Read this paper,” he wrote. “You will have tasks today that must be done.” Auchincloss commented on the paper and said they would “try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad”.

What about those two key scientific letters?

• The Lancet letter was drafted by Peter Daszak, the longtime president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the New York‑based non‑profit mentioned above, the enterprise that funneled substantial funds from the National Institutes of Health to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After writing the Lancet draft, Daszak sent it out to others, asking them to sign it. In closing his request, he added this final sentence. Please note that this statement will not have EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person, the idea is to have this as a community supporting our colleagues.

•That Lancet letter contained this phrasing. 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. One might question whether China was indeed being transparent in sharing its data. One might also wonder what conspiracy they were talking about. It’s worth noting here that Daszak, despite his obvious conflict of interest, was appointed by the World Health Organization to serve on the investigative panel to probe the origin of Covid-19 in China in early 2021.

•  Mr. Duszak does try to cover his tracks. In one of his emails he told researcher Dr. Ralph Baric that they should not sign the statement condemning the lab‑leak theory so that it seems more independent and credible. “You, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Daszak wrote.“We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” Baric, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina agreed. “Otherwise it looks self‑serving and we lose impact,” he wrote back. (Doszak later signed the Lancet letter; Baric did not)

•  Professor Baric, by the way, is the individual who in 2015 published a paper with his Wuhan Institute of Virology colleague, Shi Zhengli, in Nature Medicine. The title of that article is A SARS‑like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.

The second scientific letter

•  The letter to Nature Medicine, signed by five virologists, also has an interesting twist. Here’s how science writer Nicolas Wade describes it in the June 5, 2021 Wall Street Journal, drawing his information from the recent release of Dr. Fauci’s emails.

On Jan. 31, 2020, shortly after the SARS‑CoV‑2 genome had been decoded, Kristian Andersen, the five virologists’ leader, emailed Dr. Fauci that there were “unusual features” in the virus. These took up only a small percentage of the genome, so that “one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”

Mr. Andersen went on to note that he and his team “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” It isn’t clear exactly what he meant by this striking phrase. But anything inconsistent with an evolutionary origin has to be man‑made.

This remarkable email establishes that the Andersen team’s initial reaction was to suspect that SARS‑CoV 2 had been engineered in a lab. Their subsequent letter doesn’t adequately explain how they overcame this impression.

ŽOther evidence that this deadly virus was genetically engineered is presented by Steven Quay and Richard Muller. Their recent article discusses gain-of-function research and the genetic sequence of the Covid‑19 pathogen. Their concluding sentence reads as follows. The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain‑of function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.