Is The USA Being Misdirected About Wuhan?

Written by Paul D Thacker on December 30, 2023. Posted in Current News

Four years after the COVID outbreak began sometime in 2019 in Wuhan, China, we still don’t know how it started. Knowing how this virus began infecting humans can help prevent the next pandemic

However, evidence pointing to a lab accident continues to accumulate.

The investigative nonprofit U.S. Right to Know released new emails that found virologists collaborating with the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance had sought to mislead the Department of Defense about potential research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This is just the latest example of scientific malfeasance.

Much of the continued controversy concerns dangerous “gain-of-function” virus research, federal funding for which accelerated after various biodefense bills became law following 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks. Enter, Dr. Robert Kadlec.

For over 30 years, Dr. Kadlec has worked to counter biological weapons for an alphabet soup of various agencies—JSOC, DOD, CIA, DHS, UN. During several tours on the Hill, he also helped to write most of the critical legislation that now undergirds America’s biodefense infrastructure.

When the COVID outbreak began, Dr. Kadlec ran ASPR, which is in charge of the country’s medical and public health preparedness. He then left that position to run a Senate committee that released an interim report on the pandemic’s origin that became a controversial exclusive by ProPublica/Vanity Fair, with a 2700 word editor’s note later added.

Operating mostly in the background, Kadlec has now emerged from the bureaucracy to assert that federal scientists and the virologists they funded have misdirected the public and helped to cover up evidence that the pandemic began in a Wuhan lab—a lab funded with American money.

These researchers’ motives seem clear: protect reputations, protect federal grants.

From his home office in the DC area, where he’s lived for the last 25 years, Kadlec spoke to me over the last several months to warn that another pandemic is coming and scientists have helped cover up how this one began. “It looks like an information operation to me.” Kadlec said. “It’s directing people away. And these guys did it by a variety of means.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

THACKER: It’s been four years since this pandemic started and we know another is coming.

KADLEC: There’s a guarantee for the next one. There’s a couple every century.

THACKER: We have fire investigators that inspect a building to understand why it burned down to prevent future fires. But when you look at all the scientists’ emails that have been coming out, especially in the last six months, they seem uninterested in understanding.

It’s a cover-up.

KADLEC: Cover-up is one way to look at it; it seems to be a colossal misdirection.

If you look back to February 2020, there wasn’t a consensus about how the pandemic began, but there was clearly a strong opinion that this could have been a laboratory incident.

You had a number of people argue that there was something suspicious. When you read that Kristian Andersen email that the virus was inconsistent with expectations from an evolutionary theory…It’s basically saying, “Look, guys, I think this could be engineered.”

THACKER: Kristian Andersen is the Scripps researcher at the center of this. Andersen then goes on to author this piece in Nature Medicine that does a 180 on what he said in private. And then we have the email Fauci sent to memorialize the February 1, 2020, phone call with all these virologists, including Andersen. Were you on that call?

KADLEC: No.

THACKER: Regarding that call, Fauci writes that there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that virologists were suspicious that this mutation was intentionally inserted.

Fauci then adds that virologists’ suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to see how bat viruses adapt to infect humans. And the outbreak originated in Wuhan.

Now all this stuff Fauci writes at the time, explaining what scientists thought, later became a “conspiracy theory” when anyone else brought it up.

KADLEC: Right. You got it.

I wanted the National Academies to look at the genetic sequence, to truncate some of the more wild speculation out there. And the answer that we got back in February 2020 is that the National Academies needed more information.

That is a very different conversation than the people who were talking with Fauci and who were very explicit about what their concerns are.

THACKER: You’re on that February 1 email that Fauci wrote. And when we spoke before, you didn’t remember reading it. So I emailed it to you, and you were like, “Wow. This really explains things.”

KADLEC: Yeah. It is a “Wow.” After you sent it to me, I called a guy I worked with on the Hill—two of them actually—and I sent it to them. “Did you guys see this?”

One of them could recall it, because he’s working on the subcommittee investigating the pandemic’s origin. It would have been nice to know this. But at the time, I was the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR). So figuring out how the pandemic started wasn’t in my wheelhouse.

I was focused on countermeasures, preserving hospital systems, and distributing PPE—what little we had.

THACKER: Right.

KADLEC: So I’m on the email, but I don’t remember seeing it. But these virologists say that this virus is kind of wacky. Eventually, Eddie Holmes becomes the biggest sellout, and he seems to have gone to the other side of this for some reason.

He’s been out there with Mike Worobey, trying to make the case that this virus couldn’t come from a lab.

THACKER: Eddie Holmes is a widely celebrated virologist in Australia that Andersen mentions in his email to Fauci. And Michael Worobey is an evolutionary biologist at Arizona.

After this February 1, 2020 phone call, these virologists start putting together three papers that counter what they said privately. One paper appears in The Lancet, on February 19th.

This is just 18 days after the call, and it states the possibility of a lab accident is a conspiracy theory. Guess who signs that Lancet piece? Jeremy Farrar, who put together that February 1st call with the virologists that Fauci emailed about.

A week after that, there’s a paper in Emerging Microbes and Infections that says the same thing—conspiracy theory. And we find out that Ralph Baric helped to secretly ghostwrite it, along with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

I contacted the journal publisher, but they still haven’t done anything.

Three weeks after that, Kristian Andersen, Ian Lipkin and Eddie Holmes publish their Nature Medicine “Proximal Origins” paper that argues a lab accident was not plausible. And we now have emails showing that Fauci and Jeremy Farrar were helping to push that paper through.

How do we get three papers bubble up into the academic literature, within six weeks, that all come to the complete opposite conclusion of what virologists privately speculated on February 1?

KADLEC: I’d like to know, too.

Because of our previous conversation, I’ve started going through thousands of emails. A paper came out in 2015 in Nature, and they put out two corrections on it. It’s a Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli paper.

This is a paper funded by Fauci’s institute at the NIH, and the corrigendum adds that there was also funding from USAID, the PREDICT program.

What is going on with all this funding and this editor’s note? There seems to have been a lot of jiving by people. But to your point, how do we go from a phone call with “Well, this just doesn’t look right” to the opposite. “There’s no possible way it could be a lab.”

And I wish I could explain that. I was trying to get the National Academies to comment and they did that. Fauci got this other group, with Jeremy Farrar, and his buddies. And this group privately says they have concerns, and then publicly say there’s no way a lab accident could happen.

That’s the chain of events.

THACKER: The publishers at Nature are trying to grab people by the nose with this editor’s note and guide them down this narrative pathway. Why are you now out saying that Fauci misled us?

KADLEC: He’s a real operator, man. I’m not saying that he misled us, but somehow we went from one story to the other.

The cabal seems to be Jeremy Farrar, Francis Collins and Fauci.

They seem to be the center of what was going on. Then you have these researchers, Kristian Anderson, Robert Garry and the others being included. Mike Worobey wasn’t part of these conversations, but he became a public mouthpiece for a lot of this.

I’m very suspect of what happened. As much as you would like to think Fauci is behind this, I think Collins may be the guy. By the way, Collins is still working in the White House. Still an advisor to the President.

THACKER: You’ve told me that Fauci has one of the largest egos you have ever encountered.

KADLEC: He has a vested interest in his reputation and that of his institute. And they’re inseparable. I mean, the guy’s been around for 40 years.

When we were investigating what happened for the Senate HELP Committee, we could not link what we believe happened in Wuhan directly to NIH funding. But as you pointed, when you talk about a lab—the money, science, data, and techniques—those are all fungible.

THACKER: I worked as a lab tech at Emory University. You’ve got a bunch of grants and you just kind of figure out which equipment or supplies you charge something to. It’s not like there’s some auditor coming behind me when I was ordering something.

KADLEC: But I think what was driven here was reputational risk to NIH and to the two people that both advocated—Fauci and Collins—for unfettered, scientific research, meaning gain-of-function research.

NIH funded gain-of-function research may have resulted in this accident.

THACKER: You can see that nobody from the CDC was on that February 1, 2020 call. Yet CDC was being criticized for not being involved in trying to figure out what was going on with the pandemic.

KADLEC: It really has little to do with NIH and CDC. This goes back to my historic work in the Bush administration. There was this idea that, between the intelligence community and the scientific community, there had to be someone who would take the responsibility for leading efforts to conduct attribution.

THACKER: What does attribution mean?

KADLEC: It means who done it. Who did it come from?

If I remember correctly, it ultimately fell to the Department of State. But what science do they know, or the intelligence community? There were people somewhat reluctant to commit Health and Human Services, including NIH and CDC, to do this because they needed to be looked at as a white hat. Keep them away from this.

So who’s in charge? It was muddled in this case. It defaulted to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), which oversees the intelligence agencies. And the scientists who were advising them were conflicted.

THACKER: What’s their conflict? I wrote about several of these scientists running to the State Department, promoting the Nature Medicine “Proximal Origins” paper to get the department to say, “Welp. No lab accident.”

Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry later admitted to being part of this effort.

KADLEC: They got funding from NIH to do gain-of-function research, some of it with the Chinese.

There’s an inherent problem when you go to a small pool of real experts, and they’ve all been doing this kind of work, and some of them actually have been working with the Chinese.

THACKER: Right. We think that something bad happened in a Chinese lab, and researchers who work with that lab are telling everyone that everything is fine.

This is taken from a long document, read the rest here  substack.com

Header image: TCI Telecommunications Commission

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