A groundbreaking report from The Sunday Times reveals that the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China was engaged in merging dangerous coronaviruses to create new mutant viruses prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to biological weapons in conjunction with the Chinese military, which provided funding for the research.
Researchers at the lab are said to have worked on nine different COVID variants and to have created a highly lethal super-coronavirus through gain-of-function experiments. This engineered virus, which killed 75% of infected albino mice with human-like lungs, was described as potentially even more deadly than COVID-19 had it leaked. These experiments were partially funded by a grant from the EcoHealth Alliance, an American nonprofit.
The report alleges that Chinese military interest in the Wuhan lab was focused on the development of potential bioweapons. Investigators believe the Chinese military was interested in developing a vaccine for the viruses, which would give it a significant advantage on the world stage if it could protect its population against its own secret virus.
One such vaccine was produced with remarkable speed by military scientist Zhou Yusen, who submitted a patent for a COVID vaccine in February 2020, just a month after China admitted the outbreak of the virus to the world. This timeline has led to speculation that Zhou’s team must have been working on a vaccine no later than November 2019.
The Sunday Times report builds on details from a previous case in 2012, when six men clearing an abandoned copper mine in south China’s Mojiang region were infected with a mystery illness displaying symptoms like fever, coughs, and pneumonia. Three of them eventually died. The men had antibodies for an unknown coronavirus, and a virus was later recovered from the mine by a team led by Dr. Shi Zhengli, a top Chinese researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Around 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology reportedly began combining SARS-like viruses with the cave virus, using the Wuhan lab’s initials, WIV1. Rutgers University Professor of Chemical Biology Richard Ebright labeled this project the most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken.
U.S. State Department investigators were given unprecedented access to information regarding these activities in China before COVID-19 emerged. Metadata, phone information, and internet information collected by U.S. intelligence services revealed that Wuhan scientists were conducting experiments on a virus from the Moijang mine and covert military research, including laboratory animal experiments, at the institute before the pandemic.
Investigators also found evidence that the institute was conducting serial passaging experiments, a process to encourage pathogens to mutate into more deadly forms, on at least one of the mine viruses. One Wuhan Institute insider confirmed that these experiments were being carried out on the RaTG13 virus. This method accelerates the natural mutation process from years to just weeks or months.
In November 2019, a month before the West was alerted to the mystery virus, several Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers fell ill with symptoms similar to COVID-19. Investigators are confident this was likely COVID-19, as the researchers were working on advanced coronavirus research at the time.
No information about these experiments has been published because it was a top-secret program funded by the Chinese military, which investigators believe had conducted experiments on behalf of the military since at least 2017. The military’s interest in the lab was purportedly due to the pursuit of dual-use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.
