Researchers in Wuhan, China working with the Chinese military were genetically manipulating the world’s deadliest coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus right around the time that the Covid-19 pandemic began, according to the Sunday Times, which has reviewed hundreds of documents, “Including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started.”
The Times also interviewed the US State Department investigators, including experts specializing in China, emerging pandemic threats and biowarfare – who conducted what the outlet describes as “the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.”
[O]ur new investigation paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory.
The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.
The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.
This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.
Sunday Times