In March 2020, a couple of months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States, editors at the journal Nature Medicine appended a note to a coronavirus study it had published five years prior. “We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered,” the journal editors wrote. “There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”
The prestigious journal appears to have taken this extraordinary action for two reasons. First, the study described cutting-edge gain-of-function research that mixed different viruses together to create a man-made chimera, or hybrid of both viruses – experiments some suspected were the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the pandemic. Second, the study’s authors were Shi Zengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a research lab in the city that was ground zero for the pandemic – and Ralph Baric, the world's leading expert on coronaviruses, of the University of North Carolina.
The renowned virologist Simon Wain-Hobson said that note was an early sign of the years-long effort by the scientific establishment to distract the public and obscure the link between lab studies to create dangerous viruses and the COVID pandemic that wrecked the global economy and killed millions across the planet. During a March talk at the National Institutes of Health, Wain-Hobson blasted former NIH leaders Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci for funding these lab studies and then misleading the public about their dangers.
“Sorry to be blunt,” Wain-Hobson told NIH researchers. “I know these are former colleagues.”
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