China's deadly Covid-19 cover-up exposed

What Really Happened in Wuhan, by Sharri Markson (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2021). Paperback: 422 pages. ISBN: 978-1460760925

We Sky News viewers who in 2021 watched Sharri Markson's one-hour TV special on the origins of Covid-19 in Wuhan were left in no doubt as to its being a human-manipulated virus which had escaped from a laboratory in that city. We also were made aware of the cover-up initiated by the Chinese government, and the motives of those in the West who had supported their blatant lies. What is remarkable is the depth of research in Markson's imposing book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, and the impressive array of expert and informed opinion on which she has been able to draw.

The author begins with earlier clues in 2019 of an impending epidemic, from obscure reports of a mystery SARS-like illness to messages from whistle-blowers in China to their contacts in the U.S. In December Chinese doctors treating early cases, Ai Fen and Li Wenliang, were disciplined for "spreading rumours" and "harming stability". As the cases escalated and the bodies piled up, these voices were "disappeared" by a People's Republic of China (PRC) government which has no scruples, and other health workers were frightened into silence.

China never alerted the World Health Organisation (WHO) or any government about the coronavirus before it was worldwide. In January 2020 newspapers around the world were reporting an outbreak; but China refused offers to help contain it, reporting that it was not contagious, that there was no human-tohuman transmission and that it was confined to people who had visited the "wet" market and showed symptoms.

The extent of the death toll was of course not reported: the 3,342 death toll, published when Italy's death count was 21,000 two months later, was used to justify China's brutal lockdown in Wuhan, but convinced no-one receiving reports from contacts on the scene. Perhaps the Epoch Times estimate of 21 millions, based on defunct mobile phone accounts, was exaggerated; but it did not deserve the wholesale dismissal which it received in the Australian media.

As for the origin of the pandemic, the circumstantial evidence concerning the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) made questionable all of the Chinese government propaganda and that of fellow-travellers in the West concerning a wet market from day one. This institute boasted the largest collection of viruses in the world, and was the base for "Bat Woman" Shi Zhengli's gain-of-function experiments. Moreover, it had clear links with the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and had been put on notice for apparently lax bio-security. Given that the location of the caves in which the bats associated with the SARS virus are found are nearly 2,000 kms from Wuhan, and that these animals do not feature in the local wet markets, the animal transfer alibi was very tenuous.

Gain-of-function research involves genetically altering an organ to enhance its purposes. Further support for the virus's WIV origins lies in the institute's likely involvement in biological warfare research. It is significant that the French scientists who had been partners in the establishment of the laboratories had been excluded before 2019, and the author shows that the human transfer denied by the PRC government was a focus of experiments conducted at Wuhan. In spite of the PLA closing access to the institute, heroic Chinese whistleblowers being silenced and websites washed clean, evidence already in the possession of the U.S. State Department revealed the terrifying truth.

Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's aide, Miles Yu, stumbled across evidence of a Chinese submission to the United Nations Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention in 2011. Topics included "Creation of Man-Made Pathogens", "Population-Specific Genetic Markers" and "Targeted Drug-Delivery Technology Making It Easier to Spread Pathogens", all prone to causing global pandemics, as his report noted.

Yu's work was halted in 2021 when his team was disbanded by the Biden Administration, but research for Markson's book located the original Chinese submission. This acknowledged the dangers of creating these pathogens through gain-of-function research, and their potential for use as biological weapons targeting genetic variations between races. It also claimed that the sequencing of pathogen DNA has helped develop new drugs and vaccines.

Although in 2011 there was mention of the "unforeseeable consequences" for mankind of "accidental mistakes" in laboratories, its subsequent 2016 submission made no mention of compliance issues and even presented Wuhan as a model for biosafety management. As the author comments, if this much was revealed in a public forum, imagine the full extent of this program.

It was the work of Adelaide scientist Nikolai Petrovsky, conducting research for a vaccine against Covid-19, which clinched the case for the pandemic having man-made origins. For background to his discovery, the author explains that for a virus to infect its victim, its spike protein must latch onto the ACE2 receptor on human airway cells, and that SARS-Cov-2 does so 10 to 20 times as tightly as the original SARS spike protein did. These receptors abound in the human airway where droplets enter, and this is why it is so much more infectious.

Using a super computer, Petrovsky uploaded all the genetic sequences for ACE2 of the potential animal hosts (bats, civet cats, monkeys, ferrets, pangolins, etc.) to find that to which the new pandemic virus was best suited. Petrovsky had expected that the animal from which the virus had been transmitted would top the list and was unprepared for the result: "The virus spike protein looked like it couldn't have been better designed to fit the human ACE2", Petrovsky reported.

The scientist understood the implications that this was a man-made virus which had been accidentally released. This was March 2020 and a lengthy peer-review process followed before final publication of a paper in Nature Scientific Reports, June 2021. This paper even canvassed the possibility that the virus was chimeric, resulting from contact between a SAARS bat and a pangolin, but dismissed it, as these animals do not share a habitat. Not even in the Wuhan wet market.

Given what was known early in 2020, Markson asks why international action was so tardy, and looks especially at the WHO and Washington. Her findings are damning for both, and bordering on criminal for the WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and for two high-placed officials, Anthony Fauci MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Chief Medical Advisor to the U.S. President, and Peter Daszak, a British-born zoologist who was a member of the WHO taskforce sent to China to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in China.

Initially, the WHO advised the world against closing external borders, causing a delay which cost countless lives. The complicity of its chief, Dr Tedros, who owed his position to the influence of China among member nations, is easy to recognise. The author tells us that he acceded to the PRC's demand that the visiting 25 WHO officials in February 2020 focus only on learning how China had (successfully?) responded to the pandemic.

Actually, only three of the delegation were permitted to visit the WIV for two days and were only allowed to speak with their counterparts. Furthermore, China refused to share viral samples and details of the genome with the delegation. It is an irony that in July 2021 Dr Tedros discovered that the decision to set aside the laboratory origins of the virus had been premature, and demanded that China be more transparent, having 18 months earlier praised that nation for its co-operation and transparency.

Washington in an election year was hopelessly conflicted. Wise heads such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the heroic Peter Navarro urged closing the borders against both China and elsewhere, whereas trade officials and those crying racism resisted calls on President Trump to act swiftly and demand the truth from China. An unnamed intelligence officer explained to the author that hatred of Donald Trump and the politics surrounding him was responsible for a refusal to investigate the laboratory origins of the virus and for accusations that he was China-bashing. Yet the evidence is there in the somewhat redacted cables of the intelligence community accessed by Sharri Markson.

In 2020, the image of Anthony Fauci, portrayed in such publications as The New Yorker, made him the most trusted figure in America. He was lauded for fighting the pandemic, correcting Donald Trump in public and finally welcoming the incoming Biden administration in 2021. He also resisted calls to shut down the borders, and defended the animal transfer origin of Covid-19, pleading: "It evolved in nature and then jumped species" (National Geographic, May 2020).

All the time, however, he had been involved in the diverting of U.S. government medical and even defence funds into research projects at the WIV. His explanation, when called to account in a TV interview, was that research on animal-human interface transfer was necessary, but that "you don't want to go to Hoboken, New Jersey, or Fairfax, Virginia". In other words, Chinese lives are expendable!

Dr Fauci's colleague, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, is equally responsible for this outrage. He has boasted that Chinese bat research was entirely funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. EcoHealth Alliance received $60m in U.S. federal grants alone and, along with other gullible entities, including Australia's own CSIRO, financed "Bat Woman" Shi Zhengli's research. Daszak even boasted of being named as coauthor of many of her research papers.

In 2016 the Obama administration, alarmed at the dangers lurking in the WIV's research into deadly viruses — and perhaps its reputedly lax biosecurity — cut off NIH funding. Fauci and Daszak, however, were able to contrive for this to continue for much of the Trump period. It was only in April 2020 that the NIH extramural research assistant-director announced concern at WIV safety standards and suspended funding. This belated action was the basis of Donald Trump's claim in his interview with Markson that he had stopped it. Again Fauci and Daszak were outraged, claiming that this intervention had not gone through the normal peer-review process.

Overseas, both the media and governments tiptoed around the obvious. The prestigious medical journal, Lancet, in February 2020 published a letter from 27 leading scientists, arguing that the virus had its origin in animal transmission. It contained phrases like "strongly condemn conspiracy theories", yet it transpired that EcoHealth Alliances had been the author of this contention. "Conspiracy" became a favourite word for its chief, Daszak, who used it 97 times in ensuing tweets during the next 12 months. Former MI6 head, Sir Richard Dearlove, described the atmosphere of the time as "suppression of debate", having been warned off his inquiries by unnamed figures above him in the UK government.

Even in Australia, the resolve of Liberal Senator James Patterson and Andrew Hastie MP to keep an open mind on China was derided by the leftist media. Given the pile-on in the U.S. mainstream media against anything espoused by Donald Trump, and an unlikely visit to Australia by Mike Pompeo, it is likely that the then Morrison government's principled stand, which so enraged China, resulted from the need for an alternative Five- Eyes member to establish credibility for this charge.

When Markson's work was published, a reviewer in The Guardian (October 9, 2021) dismissed her findings, but had to resort to the opinions of Australian virologists Professor Dominic Dwyer, who had been a member of the compromised first February 2020 visit, and Danielle Anderson, who has worked at the WIV and speaks highly both of Zhengli and the WIV's professionalism.

Although Sharee Markson admits the remote possibility of animal-to-human transfer of Covid-19, and rejects the likelihood of its having been deliberately leaked by the PLA, the evidence which she advances would convince any right-minded reader. This work is of immense value and we cannot submit to socalled authorities which put their reputations on the line against the evidence.

What Really Happened in Wuhan cites the sources for the propositions in every chapter, but is deficient only in the absence of an index. To absorb the contents of the whole 400 pages of Sharri Markson's work is challenging, but her succinct final chapter is instructive. I pray that this monumental work will not be submerged in the sink-hole of cancel culture.

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