U.S. investigators suspect that COVID was the product of Chinese military bioweapon research, according to a new report.
Investigators from the U.S. State Department who looked into the origins of COVID came away from the investigation, highly suspicious of the People’s Liberation Army’s role at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), several investigators told the U.K.’s The Times. The Chinese military partnered with the lab to experiment with viruses in 2016 after the lab started to have some success mutating pathogens.
“The trail of papers starts to go dark” after the military became involved, a U.S. investigator told The Times. “That’s exactly when the classified program kicked off.”
WIV researchers began investigating an abandoned copper mine in the Mojiang region of China in 2012. Six researchers fell seriously ill after working with bat guano and were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Three of the men later died, but news of their deaths was hidden from EcoHealth Alliance, which was working with the institute on pathogenic experimentation, and the U.S. government, which was funding EcoHealth and, by extension, the WIV.
New strains of coronavirus were recovered from the cave. Some of those strains are the closest-known, naturally occurring pathogens to COVID-19 pre-pandemic. After the outbreak of COVID-19, links back to the Mojiang cave were obscured, and the cave itself was closely guarded by Chinese authorities.
“My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines,” the U.S. investigator said.
Another of the investigators told The Times, “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation, and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
One popular theory among the U.S. investigators is that the Chinese military wanted to create a bioweapon from weaponized coronavirus, as well as a vaccine, to inoculate China’s own population. Evidence suggests that researchers at the WIV were working on a vaccine for COVID-19 as early as November 2019, months before the global outbreak.
“I interviewed scientists in Asia who have close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” another investigator said. “They told me it is their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination.”
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The first COVID-19 vaccine was patented in February 2020 by Chinese military virologist Zhou Yusen. News of Zhou’s vaccine drew skepticism internationally. Zhou was later reported by Chinese state media to have died after falling off the roof of the WIV. Those reports have yet to be confirmed.
The new revelations of the Chinese military’s involvement at the WIV before and during the outbreak of COVID-19 come as the Biden administration is seeking to cool tensions with China. China-U.S. relations deteriorated earlier this year when a Chinese spy balloon was located crossing the continental United States.