The lab leak deception

Public officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp.

Chapters
0:00 Intro: What Did The Know, and What Weren't They Saying?
5:53 Proximal Origins: The Paper that Changed Everything
15:56 Ecohealth Alliance: The NIH-Wuhan Lab Connection
21:37 Changing Political Winds, Truth and Accountability
26:38 Will Gain-of-Function Research Ever Be Stopped?

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Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.

More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.

"Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically," says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It's also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.

"A really central part of this entire story that maybe is not talked about enough is the fact that so many mainstream publications have completely overlooked really key pieces of evidence in this story," says Kopp. "We see a lot of health editors and health reporters prioritizing a tidy narrative about Anthony Fauci over providing the truth to their readers."

U.S. Right to Know is devoting significant resources to its "COVID-19 Origins" research with the mission of "investigating the origins of Covid-19, the risks of gain-of-function research and mishaps at Biolabs where pathogens of pandemic potentials are stored and manipulated."

Kopp has assembled a comprehensive timeline that lays out substantial evidence that Fauci, Collins, and a number of influential scientists misled the public. Whether or not the lab leak theory is correct, it's now clear that these public officials concealed their conflicts of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and minimized their own roles in providing government funding for unsupervised gain-of-function research that may have led to the pandemic.

"It seems to me like the status quo is more or less continuing unabated," says Kopp. "I don't think that experiments are actually slowing, and I think they might actually be accelerating."

Watch the full video interview above.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Edited by Regan Taylor. Graphics by Taylor. Sound editing by Ian Keyser.

Photo Credits: Sam Tsang/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Stephen Shaver/Polaris/Newscom; Reynolds Michael/Pool/ABACA/Newscom; Rod Lamkey - CNP/CNP / Polaris/Newscom; Stefani Reynolds - Pool via CNP / MEGA / Newscom; Ureem2805, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom.

Music Credit: "Ganymede," by Yehezkel Raz via Artlist.

[umeng]

Whether it did or not, the bigger issue is how governments suppressed speech around the issue.

[slutmonke]

Crazy part of this is that Youtube would have put a strike on your channel if you'd released this a year ago.

[Gold]

We will NEVER forget what these criminals have done, and I really hope we will never allow this again, but I have little faith after watching the public just happily allow this to happen.

[kmlau]

Let's just believe for a moment this was NOT caused by a lab leak. But the fact that these scientist didn't disclose their conflict of interest alone on it's own is already a very worrysome problem.

[techno.science]

I remember telling my family after extensive research into the US funding at the Wuhan lab in early 2020 and reading various medical papers that this virus was man made and came from a lab.. and everyone thought I was a crazy conspiracy theorist.

[eat_the_octopus]

Dude. It was so obvious it was from that lab. The coincidence was waaaay too much and the fact that they fought so hard against it without any investigation right away just galvanized that lab leak.

[jamesdellaneve]

Imagine that you lived in a town that was close to a nuclear plant. Then, you found radiation in town. Wouldn’t the nuclear plant be the first place that you checked?

[jimperdue]

Money was approved by the NIH (Dr. Collins was the director) which went to Ecohealth Alliance. Approx. $600, 000 of the Ecohealth grant was earmarked for the lab in Wuhan. If we want the get to the bottom of this, congress needs to question Ecohealth and Dr. Peter Daszak, its director.

[hernantz]

All research that used public funding MUST be publicly accessible

[colinyoung]

If they were willing to cover up the lab leak theory to hide their involvement in causing the pandemic what other information might have been concealed that was pertinent to public health during this time?

[adsrentals]

I never cared for Robert Kennedy Jr because of his zealous DEQ/EPA campaigns... but his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci" has brought tears to my eyes and heartbreak to all the families who believed in medical research. May they find peace when he and cohorts are prosecuted! Mr. Kennedy... Thank you!

[katgandee]

Thank you for offering an insightful and reasoned discussion on this issue. Your description and time stamps are much appreciated. While there is little actual journalism offered through our legacy media outlets anymore, there is an abundance of solid journalism elsewhere. I don't usually look for news on youtube anymore because they still heavily censor some of the best journalists and most important stories, but some of the good stuff still gets through as evidenced by this report. Meanwhile, i will be looking for your work on other media platforms.

[nikmills]

I love that youtube still has to have their big blue box under videos that dare to mention C19.
It's so insulting to us viewers.

[MrGiggitygoo]

This whole thing was a perfect example of how government is still doing horrible things they have been doing in the past. Just because they aren't giving people syphilis, doesn't mean they aren't doing something else nefarious.

[loszhor]

The biggest irony of all of this, even with social media plotting squish the conversation on COVID we STILL got all the information we needed about it from it instead of the legacy media and the government combined! God bless the internet!

[KF-bjce]

Yes it is a travesty of how the public safety is disregarded and humans are viewed as a disposable asset. Thanks to all the people that in the end do us justice.

[hamomelette]

I will never forgive those responsible, for all the pain this disease has caused me and my family.

[pabs]

The fact that the University of Boston is conducting gain of function research on US soil as we speak pretty much sums up how much they've 'learned' from this incident. They just took one of the original viruses and added omicron spike to it which they claim has given it an 80% mortality rate in mice (compared to 0% for current strains). Wonderful.

[amybarton]

⚠️HERE IS WHAT IS MOST CONCERNING:

If Dr. Fauci was allowed to step down and was not held accountable for what he has done…
If measures are not taken to protect the public from what he could continue to do in the future even without his title…
If he is not held accountable to the full extent of the law..

My concern is who would he work for afterwards❓

I could only imagine the number of places that would take him in to work for them with little or any safe-guards at all❗️

This is very concerning not just in America but in the World❗️

How many of our loved ones, friends and family have suffered and died under this man’s watch and actions (or lack there of)❓

With the level of information he knows,

with all of the “players” he has had, could still have, and could be affiliated with in the future,

with the lack of empathy that has not been expressed by him in any of the hearings or in any of the investigations,

with the amount of evidence and the questions pertaining to that evidence that he has “danced around“ for some time now,

seeing that he has been unable and unwilling to be truthful about what he knows, the people that he has worked with behind closed doors, along with the number of non-disclosure agreements that he may have signed with a lot of entities,

he could possibly be one of the top security threats in our country‼️

For him to simply walk away from this with only a loss of title would probably give him more job openings than you could imagine❗️
I think we can all agree that there are people in this world that are just too dangerous to continue to let them out into the rest of society when the possibility of doing many more dangerous things could be done and hidden away and the American people would never be able to see what’s taking place. If something like this was hidden this great under the nose of Congress and in The House, how much greater can it be hidden if he is let back into society❓

I am only asking logical questions. I believe that this needs to continue to be investigated. This seems to be more than just a person who made poor choices.

Am I the only person who sees this?🤔 I don’t want to see America nor the rest of the world become 🐁 # 6 through X.

[privateer]

"Those who have been intoxicated with power... can never willingly abandon it." - Edmund Burke