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

The Mojiang mineshaft strain which killed several people are now recognized as 'the only members of Covid-19's immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic,' and were transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After that, "The trail of papers starts to go dark," said one US investigator. "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 US investigators, the WIV embarked on a classified program to make the mineshaft viruses more transmissible to humans, which they believe led to the creation of Covid-19, which then leaked into the city of Wuhan following a lab accident.

"It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic," said one of the investigators, who found evidence that researchers working on said experiments were hospitalized in November 2019 with Covid-like symptoms, just one month before the West became aware of the pandemic. One of the victims' relatives died as well.

"We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza," said an investigator.

Meanwhile, a separate analysis reveals that the epicenter of the original Covid-19 outbreak was close to the WIV, not Wuhan's "wet" wildlife market as previously thought.

"I interviewed scientists in Asia who have close relationships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology," said one of the investigators, who said they had evidence that the WIV was also working on a Covid-19 vaccine before the pandemic. "They told me it is their belief that there was vaccine research going on in the fall of 2019, pertinent to Covid-19 vaccination."

Rutgers University microbiologist, Richard Ebright, called the experiments "by far the most reckless and dangerous research on coronaviruses — or indeed on any viruses — known to have been undertaken at any time in any location."

Humanized mouse tests

Professor Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina is a pioneer in cutting-edge experiments which use a technique to fuse together different pathogens by combining their genes. To test the effects of these chimeric coronaviruses, Baric created "humanized" mice, which were injected with genes that allowed them to develop lungs and vascular systems similar to those of a human.

"Ominously, tools exist for simultaneously modifying the genomes for increased virulence [and] transmissibility," Baric wrote in a 2006 paper. "These bioweapons could be targeted to humans, domesticated animals or crops, causing a devastating impact on human civilisation."

Meanwhile, by 2012, campaigners and scientists were beginning to push back against gain-of-function research due to its inherent dangers.

"About 30 labs now are working with live Sars virus worldwide. The probability of escape from at least one laboratory is high," wrote Lynn Klotz, a senior fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. "Would one in ten escapes lead to a major outbreak or pandemic? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? No one knows. But for any of these probabilities, the likelihood-weighted number of victims and deaths would be intolerably high."

In 2013, WIV researcher Shi Zhengli called Ralph Baric to ask for his help in growing sufficient quantities of a Sars-like virus found in a cave, SHC014, in order to conduct testing. Baric agreed, and the WIV provided him with the genetic sequence for the strain so that he could recreate genes from its spike proteins. Baric's team inserted SHC014s's "spike gene" into a copy of the original Sars virus they created in North Carolina and tested out the new chimeric virus on humanized mice.

Meanwhile in May 2014, EcoHealth Alliance was awarded $3.7 million from the US National Institutes of Health - of which over $500,000 went to fund lab equipment purchases at the WIV, and $130,000 went directly towards Shi and her assistant.

Then, the Obama administration banned gain-of-function research, but a 'loophole' allowed the practice to proceed if deemed 'urgent and safe.' Baric argued just this to the NIH, which granted approval.

The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanised mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.

It caused a big stir. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. -Sunday Times

And in May, 2016, Daszak told a New York conference that She was moving "closer and closer" to obtaining a virus "that could really become pathogenic in people."

By 2017, She wrote in a paper that her team had sought to create eight mutant coronaviruses based on strains found in the Shitou cave - two of which were found to infect human cells. The research had been carried out in BSL-2 laboratories, while US guidelines for such research require BSL-3 precautions, which include self-closing doors, filtered air and scientists equipped with full PPE while under medical supervision, the Times writes.

We talk a lot about inequality.

Well try these numbers:

20 million people dead.
1 billion sickened
8 billion lives put into a deep freeze.

All because 1 lab wanted to do audaciously dangerous virus experiments.

And 1 US official insisted on funding it. https://t.co/i5EXAKiDOx

— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) June 11, 2023

Enter smoking gun

As Shi was creating her eight mutant viruses, the WIV took 'another perilous leap forward' with their work on the Shitou cave viruses - in what Ebright describes as the most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken - which was funded in part by EcoHealth's grant money.

The scientists selected three lab-grown mutant viruses, created by mixing Sars-like viruses with WIV1, which had all been shown to infect human cells. These mutants were then injected into the noses of albino mice with human lungs.

The aim was to see whether the viruses had the potential to spark a pandemic if they were fused together, as they might do naturally in a bat colony. The original WIV1 virus was injected into another group of mice as a comparison.

The mice were monitored in their cages over two weeks. The results were shocking. The mutant virus that fused WIV1 with SHC014 killed 75 per cent of the rodents and was three times as lethal as the original WIV1. In the early days of the infection, the mice’s human-like lungs were found to contain a viral load up to 10,000 times greater than the original WIV1 virus.

The scientists had created a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. The new genetically modified virus was not Covid-19 but it might have been even more deadly if it had leaked. -Sunday Times

In his April 2018 annual progress report the WIV, EcoHealth's Peter Daszak omitted the mice deaths. He also failed to mention them in his grant renewal application filed with the NIH later that year. In fact, he said they had only experienced "mild Sars-like clinical signs."

"What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted?"

"Fresh evidence drawn from confidential files reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report"https://t.co/6P2CzACMLP https://t.co/dfB12nqNTL pic.twitter.com/jdkpZHcjJe

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) June 11, 2023

So Daszak lied, as the experiment had actually killed six of the eight infected humanized mice.

Daszak eventually came clean, but says that his statement about "mild" illnesses was based on preliminary results (despite the fact that the mice had died months before he issued his statement).

US State Department weighs in

As the global lockdowns were coming to an end, the US State Department's investigators were given access to secret intelligence on China's coronavirus experiments in the months and years before Covid-19 emerged. Over a dozen investigators, given unparalleled access to "metadata, phone information and internet information" from US intelligence intercepts, published a report in early 2021 which made two assertions; that the WIV was experimenting on a strain, RaTG13, found in the Moijang mine, and that covert military research - including experiments performed on animal test subjects, was being conducted right before the pandemic.

"They were working with the nine different Covid variants," said one of the investigators, adding that they think one virus at the WIV was an even closer match to Covid-19 than RaTG13.

"We are confident they were working on a closer unpublished variant — possibly collected in Mojiang."

And of course, others believe that Covid-19 was largely a US production...

Scientists exposed the US created the COVID virus in a US Lab in the recent COVID Summit. pic.twitter.com/CtsE9mDpKJ

— Alexander #LM8 (@HaalandGoalKing) June 11, 2023

Either way, there you have it. Apologies from the MSM, fact checkers, social media companies, and the Biden administration can be submitted to tyler@zerohedge.com.