Covid-19 Origin: A Paper in progress

A Paper in Progress: Comments Welcome

The Engineered Pandemic: A Deliberate Dual-Use Catastrophe Foreseen and Enabled by American and Chinese Viral Manipulation

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic represents not a random evolutionary occurrence but a foreseeable catastrophe arising from reckless dual-use biological research conducted through American and Chinese collaboration. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) explicitly warned the U.S. Department of Defense in 2018 about escalating security concerns related to synthetic biology, including capabilities to engineer dangerous viruses and create novel pathogens (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). Despite these warnings, American scientific leadersnotably Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)allegedly circumvented regulatory safeguards to fund high-risk Gain-of-Function (GoF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) (Huff, 2022). The resulting crisis triggered governmental and pharmaceutical profiteering facilitated by liability shields under the PREP Act, enabling rapid deployment of products characterized by some experts as gene therapies rather than traditional vaccines. The subsequent intelligence cover-up, rooted in split assessments and deliberate data obfuscation, continues preventing definitive attribution, revealing a profound governance failure demanding immediate transparency and accountability.

Introduction: The Shadow of Engineered Contagion

The seismic rupture caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shattered global stability, disrupted economies, and eroded trust in public institutions worldwide. The official narrative often portrayed the virus as a natural zoonotic spillovera pathogen that randomly "jumped" from animal to human hosts. However, careful examination of the funding mechanisms, research methodologies, and governmental oversight preceding the outbreak reveals a far more disturbing origin: a catastrophe resulting from deliberate engagement in dual-use virology research, jointly pursued by elements within American and Chinese biodefense and academic communities.

This pursuit involved advanced techniques including novel synthetic means and Gain-of-Function (GoF) researchmethodologies explicitly designed to enhance the infectivity or pathogenicity of infectious agents. The irony is profound: warning sirens regarding this dual-use dilemma were not merely present but were formally codified in official U.S. defense analyses well before the first case emerged in Wuhan. NASEM, reporting directly to the U.S. government during the first Trump administration, detailed how rapid advances in synthetic biology dramatically expanded the spectrum of potential biodefense threats, explicitly raising concerns about capabilities to modify or create dangerous viruses (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

Yet despite this institutional foresight, key U.S. government funding streams through USAID and NIH NIAID enabled the transfer of advanced GoF technology to the WIV (Huff, 2022). The subsequent pandemic sparked intense political controversy, with figures such as Rudy Giuliani publicly alleging that "the Chinese manufactured the virus and deliberately spread it all around the world" (Giuliani, 2020, as cited in Baron Cohen, 2020), underscoring how deeply politicized the origins controversy remains. This political environment severely compromised scientific inquiry and was followed by a pharmaceutical surge generating billions of dollars under emergency authorizations that shielded manufacturers from liability. The documented failure of scientific investigation and origin discovery continues affecting society today, highlighting systemic institutional corruption demanding resolution.

The Foresight of Vulnerability: NASEM's 2018 Warnings

The U.S. national security apparatus received explicit alerts about vulnerabilities inherent in modern biotechnology years before the COVID-19 outbreak. The 2018 NASEM Consensus Study Report, Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology, was commissioned by the Department of Defense and its interagency partners to assess security concerns arising from advances in life sciences. The report defined synthetic biology as encompassing "concepts, approaches, and tools that enable the modification or creation of biological organisms," pursued primarily for beneficial purposes but carrying potential for malicious applications threatening U.S. citizens (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

The report meticulously detailed how modern biotechnology expands the catalog of potential defense concerns. Among the primary capabilities analyzed was the malicious potential to re-create known pathogens. Using contemporary technology, "the genome of almost any mammalian virus can be synthesized," relying on sequences readily available in public databases like GenBank (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). The report cited examples including poliovirus synthesis and recent construction of the horsepox genome spanning over 200,000 base pairs, demonstrating the increasing "feasibility of booting larger genomes" (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). NASEM assessed this capability as warranting the "highest relative level of concern" because the usability of this technology was ranked as "High Concern"synthesis costs were relatively low, with DNA production becoming increasingly inexpensive and cell culture facilities manageable to operate (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

More directly relevant to SARS-CoV-2's origins was the capability to make existing pathogens more dangerous through modification. NASEM determined the concern level for making existing viruses more harmful was "medium-high" for the factor of "Usability as a Weapon" (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). This capability involves modifying viral characteristics to achieve enhanced virulence, enable evasion of existing countermeasures such as therapeutics or vaccines, or alter the pathogen's host rangethe capacity to infect different species or tissues, typically determined by viral cell attachment protein interactions with receptors, often described as "Altered Tropism" (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

While rational design for such complex modifications was considered substantially challenging at the time, the potential for achieving these goals was rapidly increasing through synergies with computational modeling, high-throughput screening, and directed evolution technologies. The NASEM analysis explicitly warned that strategies based on static "agent-based lists" such as the Federal Select Agent Program would be "insufficient for managing risks arising from the application of synthetic biology" (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). This deficiency proved critical, as synthetic biology enables creation of novel or altered pathogens not appearing on regulatory lists, allowing malicious activity to evade detection and oversight.

The NASEM warnings thus constituted an explicit declaration to defense and intelligence agencies that pursuing engineered, highly virulent pathogens was becoming increasingly feasible, requiring expanded strategies beyond those modeled on Cold War threats. The report also noted the severe difficulty in achieving attribution for attacks using synthesized viruses, as resulting infections might prove indistinguishable from natural outbreaksa prescient observation given subsequent origin controversies (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

The Dual-Use Collaboration and Circumvention of Oversight

The creation of SARS-CoV-2 sits squarely within the dual-use framework identified by NASEM, rooted in U.S. funding and technology transfer to Chinese collaborators. The work was spearheaded by Dr. Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, which secured funding from NIAID (directed by Dr. Anthony Fauci) for the proposal "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence" (Huff, 2022). This NIH funding followed initial support from the USAID PREDICT program, which established the critical relationship between American and Chinese scientists, including Dr. Shi Zhengli of the WIV, and enabled collection of bat coronavirus samplesthe foundational genetic material used for subsequent GoF work (Huff, 2022).

The NIH proposal clearly outlined high-risk research, explicitly stating the intent to "test our models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments in cell culture and humanized mice" (Huff, 2022). According to whistleblower Dr. Andrew G. Huff, a former EHA employee, this translated to "using the SARS-CoVs isolated or engineered with varying types of receptors, we will test all permutations of naturally occurring and engineered viruses or pseudoviruses to specifically identify which ones would be the worst for humanity" (Huff, 2022). This process was designed to characterize "how to best engineer SARS-CoVs to make them highly transmissible between animals and humans" (Huff, 2022).

Dr. Ralph Baric, a collaborator at the University of North Carolina, proved central to this operation, specializing in GoF methodologies including creation of recombinant viruses (Huff, 2022). Baric pioneered techniques enabling engineering of viruses "without leaving any trace"the so-called "no-see-um method" designed to intentionally hide evidence of genetic manipulation (Huff, 2022). Baric himself acknowledged: "You can engineer a virus without leaving any trace. The answers you are looking for, however, can only be found in the archives of the Wuhan laboratory" (Huff, 2022).

This dangerous dual-use researchexplicitly defined in U.S. government DURC policywas allegedly conducted through systematic circumvention of required biosafety protocols. EHA, the NIH grant recipient, lacked both a Biological Safety Officer (BSO) and an Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), both mandatory for GoF and DURC research (Huff, 2022). Furthermore, Dr. Daszak is accused of "intentionally obfuscating the GoF nature of the work in the NIH proposal and illegally delegating the Principal Investigator's responsibility for biosafety and biosecurity oversight to the WIV subcontractor" (Huff, 2022). The severity of these violations is underscored by sources characterizing them as "incredibly severe and egregious" policy breaches that, given the global death toll, should warrant criminal charges (Huff, 2022).

Genetic evidence further supports synthetic origin allegations. The nineteen-nucleotide gene sequence containing the highly infectious furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 was allegedly referenced in Moderna patents filed between 2013 and 2016 (Huff, 2022). The statistical probability of this man-made sequence appearing naturally via evolution is cited as "one in the billions and is statistically impossible," leading to contentions that "the infectious agent SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine were co-developed" (Huff, 2022).

The Lab Leak, Intelligence Failure, and Politicization

The inevitable system failure, predicted by NASEM's analysis of high-risk research complexity, materialized as a global pandemic. Years before the outbreak, U.S. officials recognized the precarious safety situation at the WIV. In January 2018, State Department officials visited the WIV and transmitted two diplomatic cables to Washington warning about "safety and management weaknesses" at the facility, including a "serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians" needed to safely operate the high-containment BSL-4 laboratory (Rogin, 2020). These cables specifically warned that the lab's bat coronavirus research "represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic" (Rogin, 2020). One official described the cable as a "warning shot" intended to compel attention to the risky research being undertaken (Rogin, 2020).

Despite these clear diplomatic and scientific warnings, the U.S. intelligence community subsequently experienced what has been characterized as the "largest intelligence failure in US history" since 9/11 (Huff, 2022). However, some IC elements possessed awareness of the outbreak extraordinarily early. By late November 2019, the American intelligence community "knew that a virus had escaped" from the Chinese laboratory through a human intelligence asset inside the WIV (Huff, 2022). This information was obtained before China made any public statements, raising concerns that Chinese bureaucrats in Wuhan and Beijing "knew how to cover up a report" (Huff, 2022).

Early studies informed by CIA intelligence were prepared for President Trump in late December 2019, emphasizing that limiting vulnerability of the elderly was key to containing spread (Hersh, 2025). However, these warnings were reportedly ignored by the White House, which remained focused on securing a trade deal with China (Hersh, 2025). Later, these critical early studies and source information were "expunged from the official internal records in Washington" in what sources characterize as a "cover-up to protect a president who did not do the right thing" (Hersh, 2025).

The Chinese government immediately engaged in extensive cover-up efforts, controlling the narrative through censorship and data manipulation. They allegedly manipulated initial case data, removing records inconsistent with the desired narrative that the outbreak began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late December 2019 (Huff, 2022). This manipulation proved effective, leading many prominent scientists to adopt the official Chinese narrative (Huff, 2022).

The failure of attribution was subsequently codified within the U.S. intelligence community itself. A split analytical report published by the Directorate of National Intelligencewhere half the analysts concluded lab leak while the other half concluded natural emergenceserved to "muddy the water" (Huff, 2022). According to one analysis, this deliberate ambiguity protected the U.S. from acknowledging its role in funding and transferring the dangerous biotechnology that resulted in SARS-CoV-2 (Huff, 2022).

The politicization intensified with figures like Rudy Giuliani making bold claims that "the Chinese manufactured the virus and deliberately spread it all around the world" (Giuliani, 2020, as cited in Baron Cohen, 2020), while key U.S. government officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins allegedly "criminally conspired to smear 'fringe epidemiologists'" who criticized governmental response and policy narratives (Huff, 2022). Dr. Fauci publicly dismissed engineered virus theories as "preposterous" and "attacks on science" (Huff, 2022). Scientists such as Dr. Kristian Andersen, who initially believed the virus showed engineering signatures, dramatically reversed their public positions after receiving massive increases in NIH fundingtripling from approximately $7 million to over $23 million (Huff, 2022). This pattern of corruption ensures that "scientists will do or say anything to maintain their funding" (Huff, 2022).

The Vaccine Gold Rush, Gene Therapy, and Liability Shields

The pandemic unleashed unprecedented pharmaceutical industry response characterized by immense profiteering. Global sales of mRNA products alone approached "$50 billion in 2021 alone" (Huff, 2022). The extraordinary pace of vaccine development was remarkable, with some synthetic vaccine strains developed within days and products rolling out by Christmas 2020 despite traditional vaccine development requiring minimum four-year timelines (Huff, 2022).

This pharmaceutical rush was enabled by U.S. government deployment of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act Declaration, providing liability immunity for manufacturers and covered healthcare professionals (Huff, 2022). Analysis associated with DARPA and UPMC prior to the pandemic confirmed that "liability immunity was required for vaccine manufacturers; otherwise, they would not be willing to manufacture vaccines due to the high liability and risk associated with a shortened safety and evaluation period" (Huff, 2022). This liability shield allowed rollout of vaccines under Emergency Use Authorization, effectively transforming the global public into "lab rats" for rapidly deployed technology (Huff, 2022).

The products themselves were redefined and marketed under misleading terms. The President of Bayer's Pharmaceuticals Division, Stefan Oelrich, publicly acknowledged in 2021 that mRNA shots are "gene therapy" marketed as "vaccines" (Huff, 2022). He stated: "ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say: if we had surveyed two years ago in the public'would you be willing to take a gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?'we probably would have had a 95 percent refusal rate" (Huff, 2022).

U.S. government-sponsored trials for Moderna and Pfizer acknowledged their technology was not tested for effectiveness against viral infection or transmission, focusing exclusively on reducing illness severity (Huff, 2022). This constitutes what sources characterize as corrupt "manipulation of operational definitions by scientists receiving government funding"redefining "vaccine" to mean severity reduction rather than transmission prevention (Huff, 2022).

The connections between engineered virus and countermeasures are further solidified by genetic evidence regarding the furin cleavage site patented by Moderna, leading to contentions that the infectious agent and mRNA vaccine were co-developed (Huff, 2022). This situationwhere the public became experimental subjects for rapidly deployed, liability-shielded gene therapy against an engineered pathogendemonstrates catastrophic overlap between unchecked dual-use research and self-interested corporate and governmental response.

The Hypocrisy of Information Warfare: Pentagon Anti-Vax Propaganda and American Commercial Interests

Even as the U.S. government and social media platforms aggressively suppressed domestic vaccine misinformation and punished those spreading anti-vaccine content, the Pentagon was simultaneously conducting a secret propaganda campaign to undermine China's vaccine efforts in the Philippines and other countries. This profound contradiction reveals the weaponization of public health information for geopolitical purposes and commercial advantage, with devastating consequences for vulnerable populations who ultimately became captive markets for American pharmaceutical products.

According to a Reuters investigation, "at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China's growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus" (Bing & Schectman, 2024). The clandestine operation aimed to "sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China" through "phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos" (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X (formerly Twitter) matching descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation, with almost all created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan "#Chinaangvirus Tagalog for China is the virus" (Bing & Schectman, 2024). The propaganda effort specifically targeted China's Sinovac inoculation, posting messages such as "COVID came from China and vaccines came from China, don't trust China!" and claiming that Chinese vaccines contained pork gelatin, making them forbidden under Islamic lawa message designed to exploit religious sensitivities among Muslim populations in Central Asia and the Middle East (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

The campaign's messaging was particularly insidious. One typical tweet from July 2020 read: "From China PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real" (Bing & Schectman, 2024). The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued into Joe Biden's presidency, persisting even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation (Bing & Schectman, 2024). The Biden White House ultimately issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, but the damage had been done (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

The Commercial Dimension: Creating Markets for American Vaccines

The Pentagon's anti-Chinese vaccine propaganda campaign served dual purposes: undermining Beijing's geopolitical influence while simultaneously creating market demand for American pharmaceutical products. The strategic calculus was revealed in Washington's vaccine distribution policy, called Operation Warp Speed, which "favored inoculating Americans first, and it placed no restrictions on what pharmaceutical companies could charge developing countries for the remaining vaccines not used by the United States" (Bing & Schectman, 2024). This policy allowed American companies to "play hardball" with developing countries, "forcing them to accept high prices," according to Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University who has worked with the World Health Organization (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

The economic exploitation was stark. While China pursued "an ambitious COVID assistance program, which included sending masks, ventilators and its own vaccines still being tested at the time to struggling countries" with Xi Jinping announcing in May 2020 that "the vaccine China was developing would be made available as a 'global public good,' and would ensure 'vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries,'" the United States took a fundamentally different approach (Bing & Schectman, 2024). Sinovac remained "the primary vaccine available in the Philippines for about a year until U.S.-made vaccines became more widely available there in early 2022" (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

The consequence of this strategy was that Filipinos, deliberately misled by Pentagon propaganda to fear Chinese vaccines, found themselves with limited options. The U.S. military's psychological operation successfully undermined trust in the most readily available vaccines, creating a situation where the population either went unvaccinatedcontributing to the Philippines having "one of the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia" (Bing & Schectman, 2024)or eventually had to wait for and purchase more expensive American vaccines when they finally became available.

This cynical manipulation of public health information for commercial advantage meant that the Filipino people bore the cost in both lives and treasure. By the time President Rodrigo Duterte addressed the vaccination crisis in June 2021, only 2.1 million of the Philippines' 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus (Bing & Schectman, 2024). Duterte's desperation was palpable when he stated in a televised address: "You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed. There is a crisis in this country ... I'm just exasperated by Filipinos not heeding the government" (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

The hypocrisy is staggering. While the U.S. government prosecuted domestic misinformation campaigns and social media companies removed anti-vaccine content to protect public health, the Pentagon was deliberately spreading the same type of misinformation abroad for strategic and commercial advantage. American public health experts condemned the program. Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine, stated: "I don't think it's defensible. I'm extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that" (Bing & Schectman, 2024). Lucey, a former military physician who assisted in the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks, emphasized that the effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked "undermining overall public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines" (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

The campaign's implementation demonstrated sophisticated psychological operations capabilities. To implement the anti-vax campaign, "the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time" (Bing & Schectman, 2024). Sources involved in planning and execution revealed that "the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military's psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos" (Bing & Schectman, 2024). A senior military officer involved in the program candidly admitted: "We weren't looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud" (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

The real-world consequences were devastating. By November 2021, COVID had claimed the lives of 48,361 people in the Philippines, with the pandemic hitting the country especially hard due to one of the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia (Bing & Schectman, 2024). Filipino healthcare professionals and former officials contacted by Reuters expressed outrage at the U.S. military propaganda effort, recognizing how it exploited an already vulnerable citizenry (Bing & Schectman, 2024). Dr. Nina Castillo-Carandang, a former adviser to the World Health Organization and Philippine government during the pandemic, stated: "Why did you do it when people were dying? We were desperate. We don't have our own vaccine capacity," noting that the U.S. propaganda effort "contributed even more salt into the wound" (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

This information warfare operation reveals the profound moral bankruptcy at the intersection of national security strategy, commercial interests, and public health. While Americans were told that combating vaccine misinformation was essential to saving lives, their own military was spreading that same misinformation to advance geopolitical objectives and create captive markets for American pharmaceutical companies, directly contributing to preventable deaths among populations already devastated by the pandemic. The operation also extended beyond Southeast Asia to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, with the Pentagon using "a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China's vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day" (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

The ultimate beneficiaries of this propaganda campaign were American pharmaceutical corporations, who profited from delayed access to vaccines in developing countries and from the premium prices they could charge once populations undermined by U.S. military disinformation had no alternative but to purchase American products. This represents a particularly egregious form of disaster capitalism, where public health crises become opportunities for market manipulation through state-sponsored psychological warfare.

The Legacy of Broken Science and Systemic Corruption

The COVID-19 origins controversy exposed how profoundly scientific integrity has suffered, undermined by conflicts of interest, political pressure, and perverse funding models. This systematic corruption persists because involved scientists "will do or say anything to maintain their funding" (Huff, 2022). The core policy failure was rooted in reliance on the flawed concept of Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC), criticized as "unenforceable" and "intentionally structured to keep control in the hands of the scientists and institutions involved" (Huff, 2022).

Sources explicitly demand elimination of the DURC concept, replaced with specific policies targeting GoF research, noting the current system enabled "a handful of corrupt and greedy scientists killing millions of people globally" (Huff, 2022). The failure extended beyond individual malfeasance to encompass institutional structuresthe reliance on self-regulation by academics and bureaucrats proved catastrophically inadequate for managing dual-use technologies with civilization-threatening potential.

The NASEM report had explicitly warned that advances in "automation, computation, and machine learning" were rapidly integrating into laboratory processes, enabling researchers to "screen massive collections of genetic sequences for properties" that could be "leveraged by malicious actors to streamline testing of agents, increase fidelity, and fine-tune targeting" (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). This convergence of computational tools with biological research created enhanced capabilities for "targeting specific individuals or subpopulations based on their unique genomic and health data," enabling what the report termed "enhanced targeting capabilities" and potentially facilitating "ethnospecific or personalized terrorism" (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

Furthermore, the intelligence community's involvement in dual-use research extended beyond mere oversight. The CIA maintained an asset inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with this asset "reportedly being paid by arrangement with the NIH" (Huff, 2022). Additionally, "the CIA and Department of Defense (DoD) use venture capital firms, such as In-Q-Tel (IQT), to invest in companies that develop technology of national security interest," and significantly, "the work that led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 was presented to IQT" (Huff, 2022). This model demonstrates that the intelligence community actively sought to integrate dual-use technological advancements into the national security apparatus, fundamentally blurring the lines between military, intelligence, and civilian/academic research.

Conclusion: A Demand for Disclosure and Accountability

The COVID-19 pandemic was an engineered catastrophe rooted in reckless pursuit of dual-use biological manipulation facilitated by U.S. government funding and scientific malfeasance. The risks were clearly articulated by expert panels like NASEM early in the Trump administration (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). The timeline reveals systemic failure: funding of GoF research in collaboration with China, deliberate evasion of federal biosafety protocols by researchers like Daszak, documented intelligence warnings regarding WIV safety weaknesses (Rogin, 2020), subsequent intelligence cover-up designed to protect U.S. government complicity (Huff, 2022; Hersh, 2025), enormous liability-shielded profits garnered by pharmaceutical companies selling products characterized as co-developed gene therapies (Huff, 2022), and the Pentagon's secret anti-vaccine propaganda campaign that deliberately undermined public health efforts abroad to create commercial advantages for American pharmaceutical companies while suppressing similar misinformation at home (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

The unresolved origins controversy remains intensely politicized, masking profound oversight failures impacting national security today. Ongoing attempts to obfuscate truththrough manipulated data, suppressed whistleblowers, split intelligence assessments, and hypocritical information warfare operations serving corporate interestsconstitute continuing cover-up protecting those responsible for sponsoring or enabling virus creation and exploiting the resulting crisis for profit.

To prevent recurrence in both biological and emerging technological domains, the cycle of self-regulation and governmental opacity must end. The American people, who were subjects of this research and recipients of its catastrophic consequences, deserve unvarnished truth. We must demand immediate and complete release of all records, data, correspondence, and proposals related to GoF work conducted by EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV, UNC, and their U.S. government sponsors (NIH, USAID, DoD, and CIA/In-Q-Tel). Specifically, this includes:

• All internal U.S. government studies and records that were "expunged from the official internal records in Washington" regarding the early response and mitigation of the virus (Hersh, 2025).

• The original NIH Grant #R01AI110964, "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence," including all accompanying documentation, peer reviews, and the Select Agent Form cited as having omitted the GoF work (Huff, 2022).

• All proprietary data, analyses, and genetic sequences (including those in the Eidith database) collected by EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV, and their partners, which were "foundational and were used to construct SARS-CoV-2" (Huff, 2022).

• All documentation related to the In-Q-Tel (IQT) presentations and the "SARS-CoV-2 gain of function and humanized mice research" funded by NIAID and USAID (Huff, 2022).

• Full disclosure of the "incredibly severe and egregious...policy violations" concerning biosafety and biosecurity that occurred at EHA and its subcontractors (Huff, 2022).

• Complete records of the Pentagon's secret anti-vaccine propaganda campaign, including all communications, operational plans, social media accounts, assessments of the campaign's impact on public health outcomes in targeted countries, and any coordination with pharmaceutical industry representatives regarding market access and pricing strategies (Bing & Schectman, 2024).

Only through full accountability and transparency regarding how this dangerous dual-use knowledge was created and transferred can we restore integrity to science and protect the public from engineered threatsbiological or digitallooming on the horizon.

The documented convergence of dual-use research vulnerabilities, intelligence community involvement, governmental obfuscation, pharmaceutical profiteering, and weaponized information warfare reveals a system fundamentally compromised by conflicts of interest and lack of accountability. The Pentagon's anti-vaccine propaganda operationconducted even as the U.S. government suppressed similar domestic misinformation and designed to create captive markets for American pharmaceutical productsdemonstrates how national security imperatives and commercial interests can override public health considerations with lethal consequences for vulnerable populations. Without comprehensive reform replacing self-regulation with independent, transparent oversight, the conditions enabling this catastrophe will persist, threatening future generations with engineered biological agents or analogous technological threats emerging from artificial intelligence and other dual-use domains. The time for calculated ambiguity has passedfull disclosure and accountability are not merely desirable but essential for national security, public health, and the restoration of ethical governance in an age of civilization-threatening technologies.

References

Bing, C., & Schectman, J. (2024, June 14). Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic. Reuters. click here

Giuliani, R. (2020). [Interview]. In Borat subsequent moviefilm. Amazon Studios.

Hersh, S. (2025, August 22). Trump's first COVID mistake: Despite early human intelligence about the virus in Wuhan, the president was slow to act. Seymour Hersh [Substack newsletter]. mourhersh.substack.com

Huff, A. G. (2022). The truth about Wuhan: How I uncovered the biggest lie in history. Skyhorse Publishing.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). Biodefense in the age of synthetic biology. The National Academies Press. .org/10.17226/24890

Rogin, J. (2020, April 14). State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses. The Washington Post. click here

The key document that was made available during the crisis was the one-hundred-page annex to the executive report handed to Trump late in December of 2019. It was clear then, as the attachment pointed out, that limiting the vulnerability of elderly and poor Americans was key to limiting the spread of the virus.

add notebook LLM as a teaching moment accompanying the article DUAL USE SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY