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When scientists, public health officials and politicians collaborated to obscure the origins of COVID-19 they engaged in the biggest cover-up in medical history, according to Danish physician, researcher and co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, Dr. Peter Gøtzsche.
In an essay posted Oct. 6 on the Institute for Scientific Freedom website, which Gøtzsche founded in 2019, he said the Chinese government hid the likely origins of the virus in gain-of-function research performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The cover-up then extended to U.S. academics with conflicts of interest, medical journals, the media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was then advising the Trump administration on the U.S. government’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Considering the odds for how the virus could have come into being, Gøtzsche said he had “no doubt that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak in Wuhan and that the virus was manufactured there.”
He wrote:
“COVID-19 is the pandemic that should never have occurred. It is deeply concerning that the WHO [World Health Organization] and our governments have not yet called for a ban on this highly dangerous playing with fire research that hasn’t led to anything of use but to the death of over 7 million people.”
The cover-up began in China
The Chinese government was the first to cover up the origins, Gøtzsche wrote. He cited a 2023 investigation that found the first three people infected by the virus and admitted to the hospital all worked at the Wuhan lab, where they did gain-of-function research.
Then, when the WIV published its first paper about COVID-19, it conspicuously failed to mention that one of the virus’ key characteristics — namely the furin cleavage site that makes the spike protein more infectious to humans — had been created at WIV.
The Chinese military also played a role in the cover-up. It had funded gain-of-function research, some of it allegedly without the knowledge of U.S. collaborators like EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak.
One of the Chinese military researchers, Zhou Yusen, produced a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February 2020, “with remarkable speed.” He died mysteriously in May 2020, Gøtzsche wrote.
Fauci pushed ‘Proximal Origin’ deception
Gøtzsche wrote about released emails and messages revealing that during the July 2023 congressional hearing on lab origins, top U.S. scientists lied to Congress about their initial concerns the virus was made in the Wuhan lab with funding support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Scientists Robert Garry, Ph.D., and Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., two of the authors of the “Proximal Origin” article published in Nature Medicine claiming the virus had zoonotic origins (transmitted from animals to humans), both testified to Congress they believed the virus had emerged from nature.
However, communications since made public show the scientists, both before and after publishing their paper, believed the virus had leaked from a lab.
For example, Andersen wrote on Feb. 1, 2020:
“I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
This statement, Gøtzsche noted, was one of 60 clear statements made in January and February 2020 among the “Proximal Origin” paper authors expressing their belief that COVID-19 was a bioengineered virus leaked from a lab.
Despite their privately expressed doubts, the authors publicly disparaged the very “lab leak conspiracy theories” they believed. And, Gøtzsche wrote, they actively sought to misinform reporters, including Don McNeil from The New York Times, who was asking “tough questions.”
Andersen told Congress his ideas changed in 2020 based on “many factors, including additional data, analyses, learning more about coronaviruses, and discussions with colleagues and collaborators.”
But released emails show that pressure from Fauci and other “higher ups” led the authors to “abandon the lab-leak theory as implausible,” Gøtzsche wrote.
Fauci then used the Nature Medicine article that he helped to shape in an April 2020 White House press conference as evidence the virus arose naturally.
Fauci influenced national intelligence investigations
Fauci also tried to influence the CIA’s review of the COVID-19 origins, Gøtzsche wrote, visiting the headquarters while the review was going on, without signing in and out of the building so there was no record of his visit.
Seven CIA analysts “with significant scientific expertise” on the agency’s COVID-19 Discovery Team “received performance bonuses after changing a report to downplay concerns about a possible lab origin of the virus,” he added.
The CIA whistleblower also said Fauci pushed the “Proximal Origin” paper in meetings at the U.S. Department of State and White House to put people off the trail of the lab leak origins.
“Fauci had reasons to push scientists and intelligence analysts to believe the virus had a zoonotic origin since his agency had issued a grant to fund the dangerous research in Wuhan,” Gøtzsche noted.
Daszak, a longtime collaborator of the WIV, directed funding from sources including the NIH to do gain-of-function research at the lab.
And Daszak’s DEFUSE proposal sought funding from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) in 2018 to introduce human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related coronaviruses.
Although DARPA declined to fund that research, U.S. investigators reported that Wuhan scientists had then proceeded to do exactly what Daszak’s failed funding application proposed.
“If the SARS-CoV-2 virus had escaped from research Daszak funded, he would be potentially culpable,” Gøtzsche wrote.
Medical journals and social media platforms collaborated in cover-up
It was not only the journal Nature Medicine that played a role in the cover-up. In what Gøtzsche called “the darkest moment in science in my lifetime,” The Lancet published a letter, organized by Daszak himself, to “condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Daszak also worked behind the scenes to stop colleagues involved with the research from signing the letter in order to obscure their connection.
He was eventually called out by a group of scientists known as the Paris Group, who urged the NIH and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to remove him because he “withheld critical information and misled public opinion by expressing falsehoods.”
Despite revelations showing Daszak’s involvement, Gøtzsche said social media companies’ “fact checkers” continued to cite the Nature Medicine paper and the letter in The Lancet to censor as “misinformation” posts that characterized the lab-leak theory as plausible.
Based on all of this, Gøtzsche concluded that “The cover-up of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is the worst in medical history. This will stand as a pillar of shame in the coming centuries.”
Read Gøtzsche’s essay here.
