By JIM GERAGHTY – Feb 3, 2022 – for National Review

My cmnt: This is just a small excerpt from the whole article which can be read by clicking the link above.

My cmnt: With emails that had to be obtained thru the Freedom of Information Act we now know that Dr Fraud Fauci was lying to cover-up his involvement with funding the Wuhan lab that created the gain-of-function (also which Fauci lied about) SARS-CoV-2 virus as a bio-weapon for the Chinese communist government.

My cmnt: From FDR giving away Eastern Europe to Stalin to Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Half-bright declaring having the U.S. as the world’s lone superpower was detrimental to world stability and peace to Obama’s helping Iran obtain nuclear weapons to O’Biden’s Afghanistan debacle we have democrats like Anthony Fauci with great power using it to undermine America.

My cmnt: What is wrong with these people?!

EcoHealth Alliance was clearly interested in gain-of-function research in its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A March 2018 grant proposal from EcoHealth to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed “introduc[ing] appropriate human-specific cleavage sites” into SARS-like viruses; in other words, to take existing bat viruses and make them more likely to infect human beings. The proposal declared, “Dr. Shi, Wuhan Institute of Virology, will conduct viral testing on all collected samples, binding assays and some humanized mouse work.”

(Before the pandemic, Chinese research scientists had engineered a supply of mice with “humanized” lungs, to give a better sense of how these viruses would affect human beings. Some U.S. officials have wondered if the Chinese scientists’ supply of mice with “humanized” lungs had a more sinister purpose, as part of an effort to develop viruses more likely to kill human beings. But at this point, there is no concrete evidence that the virus research in the Wuhan labs was connected to a desire to develop biological weapons.)

The NIH revealed last year that EcoHealth Alliance had un­intentionally made viruses more virulent during their research work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019. “The limited experiment described in the final progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor on a mouse model,” NIH’s Lawrence Tabak wrote.

“All other aspects of the mice, including the immune system, were unchanged,” the letter continued. “In this limited ex­periment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat corona­virus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus.” NIH emphasized that “as sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do.”

EcoHealth was supposed to notify NIH if it enhanced a virus’s ability to grow by a factor of ten. Instead, the work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology created novel coronaviruses that enhanced viral growth by 1,000-fold to 10,000-fold — and the heavier viral loads made the mice sicker.

Shortly after the Wuhan Institute of Virology was achieving these breakthroughs in gain-of-function research, making bat coronaviruses much more contagious, another potentially ominous event developed: According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. intelligence determined that three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care “with symptoms consistent with both Covid and common seasonal illness.” They may have just had the seasonal flu. Or they may have brought their work home with them, so to speak.

Finally, there is the undeniably suspicious behavior of the Chinese government since the first cases were reported in Wuhan in December 2019. Until January 21, 2020, the Wuhan Regional Health Commission insisted that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found.” On January 4, 2020, former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield was incredulous during a phone call with his Chinese counterpart, George Gao. Redfield described asking his old friend Gao, “George, you don’t really believe that mother and father and daughter all got it from an animal at the same time, do ya?” Gao insisted there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. But Redfield recounted that two days later, Gao broke down during a call, “audibly and tearfully distraught after finding ‘a lot of cases’ in the community who had never visited the wet market.”

In late January and early February, the Chinese government ordered all labs processing samples of the strange new virus to destroy them. On January 3, China’s National Health Commission ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. The justification for this order was public safety, although it is hard to see the public-safety benefit in suppressing information about the disease.

It took a year to get a World Health Organization investigative team into Wuhan, and when that team arrived, it encountered angry refusals to turn over raw data about the earliest cases. According to the New York Times, “disagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts among the typically mild-mannered scientists on both sides.” The Chinese government has refused to allow another team of investigators to enter Wuhan or the labs in the city. The Chinese government does not care if it looks guilty.

A much-hyped U.S. intelligence-community investigation completed in August offered almost nothing useful, declaring, “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.” Ninety days of effort, with all the resources of the U.S. government, generated nothing new.

To paraphrase Ebright, in the autumn of 2019, there were three institutions in the entire world that were doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats. One was in Galveston, Texas, one was in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the third was in Wuhan, China.

In theory, the pandemic could have started with some random Chinese person who didn’t have any connection to the bat coronavirus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan CDC. This person would have a spectacularly unlucky run-in with a bat or other animal, and that random Chinese person caught the exceptionally rare naturally occurring animal virus that infects, sickens, and spreads among human beings like wildfire. This same hyper-contagious bat virus would have the exceptionally unusual trait of being ex­tremely difficult to find in bats.

This extraordinarily unlucky person would then travel to the metaphorical doorstep of one of the three labs in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats and start infecting other people in the city of Wuhan. Under the natural-origin theory, the Wuhan laboratories just happen to be mind-bogglingly unlucky that events played out in a way that so closely mimics the consequences of a lab accident.

That would be a remarkable series of coincidences.

Or, within the walls of an institution that we know was doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses found in bats, aiming to make them more contagious and virulent, at an institution that we know was insufficiently staffed to operate safely, a single employee may have not worn his personal protective equipment correctly one day in late 2019. A single employee may have been scratched or bitten by a bat, or inhaled a virus shed by a bat undergoing the stress of an anal swab, or just carelessly wiped his eyes or nose or mouth. After that employee left the lab and returned home for the evening, he would have been shedding viruses once the infection took hold — in his home, through the public-transportation system and streets and sidewalks, and perhaps he or a family member visited a seafood market.

As of this writing, more than 5.6 million people around the world have perished from Covid, and 354 million have been infected.

The first great mystery of this pandemic is how it got started — a question that must be answered to adequately prepare us for another pandemic in the future.

The second great mystery of this pandemic is why so many powerful people don’t seem to feel any sense of urgency about solving the first great mystery.

This article appears as “Made in China” in the February 21, 2022, print edition of National Review.