Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
The Sunday Times 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. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science. Researchers who have attempted to find conclusive proof have been hampered by China’s lack of transparency.
However, our 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.
Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.
They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”
According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.