The chances that COVID leaked from China’s secretive virology lab in Wuhan are “99.9%,” but the World Health Organization (WHO) will probably never be able to prove it, Johns Hopkins Professor Marty Makary told “Morning Wire,” in an exclusive interview Friday.
The WHO probe is taking place even as China goes on the offensive, claiming the virus that has killed over 6 million people worldwide started in the U.S. But Makary, a best-selling author and surgeon, said it has always been obvious where it originated.
“For a lot of scientists, it’s 99.9% likely,” Makary said. “And it’s the default hypothesis until proven otherwise.”
Makary noted Beijing’s new narrative, tracing the virus to gain-of-function research conducted at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick in Maryland.
The World Health Organization is now investigating the lab leak theory, which it previously dismissed as disinformation. The Mainstream Media labeled those who raised lab leak concerns as conspiracy theorists.
The WHO failed and the media covered for them.
— Rep. Claudia Tenney (@RepTenney) June 15, 2022
Much of the media still brands the claim a conspiracy theory on the word of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden. But the WHO, which previously called the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely,” last week issued a report saying it should be more thoroughly investigated.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus went as far as to say it is premature to rule out a lab leak.
“I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” Tedros said. “It’s common.”
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China reacted swiftly.
Beijing responded pretty forcefully to the WHO report last Friday foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a daily press briefing.
“The lab leak theory is totally a lie concocted by anti-China forces for political purposes, which has nothing to do with science,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, going on to claim COVID may have come from an American lab.
Makary said Beijing is deflecting.
“They’re trying to bring attention to the fact that similar experiments were being done around the world, including in the U.S.,” the Harvard-trained doctor said.
Makary is pessimistic that the smoking gun the WHO says it needs will ever turn up.
“They’re saying, ‘Unless we get more information, then we’re not going to be able to know. And in order to know, we’re going to have to have lab documents. We’re going to have to have experts who were involved come out with witness protection,’” he said.
“Nobody thinks that’s going to happen,” Makary said, noting Beijing’s habit of punishing whistleblowers and their families.
But what Americans should be able to get answers to, according to Makary, is what role U.S. taxpayers played in funding gain-of-function research, which engineers viruses to be more transmissible and even deadly. If such research helped unleash COVID on the globe, it is the biggest liability case in world history, he said.
“It’s arguable as to whether or not [U.S. taxpayer funding] was directly going to gain-of-function research,” Makary said. “But when Dr. Fauci learned of this, he called an emergency meeting early in the pandemic of scientists from around the country. We now have records … that show that scientists in that initial emergency meeting from top labs in the United States said, basically, ‘This is likely from the lab.’ And one of them even said, ‘It’s likely engineered.’”
Makary noted that Fauci and his boss at National Institutes of Health Francis Collins moved quickly to quash talk of a lab leak, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“And after that there was sort of a pact made to not speak publicly because it would so-called feed the conspiracists,” Makary said. “And both of those scientists who said it was a lab leak came out publicly and said they don’t think it’s a lab leak. Soon after, both were awarded a total of $9 million in NIH funding after that time.”
“So it does look bad, for sure,” he said.