Declan Hill: Covid - The Slow Motion Chernobyl

This week (January 2025) the CIA announced that they believe the origin of Covid came from a laboratory leak.

"Our intelligence, our science and our common sense all really dictate that the origins of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

Finally.

Three years after CrimeWaves released our series - The Slow-Motion Chernobyl.

These are episodes that we, at CrimeWaves Podcast are both very proud of - the research is in-depth, shocking and has been proven absolutely correct - and still traumatized.   For this series and CrimeWaves was deliberately censored and shadowbanned by both Twitter/X and LinkedIn at the time of broadcast.  

Please listen, you will hear nothing partisan, no personal or political attacks but it is the story of the greatest man-made plague in human history. 

**
It was a slow motion Chernobyl. 
Here is what, the balance of probabilities tells us about the origins of this Covid epidemic that haunts us all. 
It was the worst industrial accident in the history of humanity.
In general, Chinese laboratory technicians are so badly trained, so ill-paid and so mis-guided that some of them used to sell infected research animals to local butchers.
The specific virologists in Wuhan lab played God. They created super-virulent viruses, more powerful than anything natural. 
Their methods like “finding a gas leak with a match”.
Their science so misguided nine years ago an academic warned of an 80% chance of a global epidemic.
When the near-inevitable leak came, they covered it up.
The Communist Chinese jailed anyone brave enough to warn the world.
The World Health Organization (WHO) helped them.
More than 12 million people have died and continue to die. 
It could happen again.
On crimewavespodcast.com - we examine, in a special five-part series, the ‘Crime of the Century’ - how it occurred and how it was covered-up. 

Please subscribe, rate, review or like this episode of CrimeWaves at YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.  
For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
www.crimewavespodcast.com
www.declanhill.com
Twitter: declan_hill

Transcript

 Covd:  The Slow-Motion Chernobyl

Declan Hill: [00:00:00] What makes a crime of the century? You've heard that cliche in every single crime podcast. There's always a story, usually a murder of a set with some rich guy, and there's a sexual background, and there's relatives, and a will, and all this kind of stuff. And what's notable is that they're almost forgotten.
Within a couple of years came back to me strongly a couple of weeks ago. My brilliant young students They're late 20s early late teens early 20s. We talked about the OJ Simpson trial No idea what I was talking about. I mean, I'll be it This is a group that doesn't know what Lord of the Rings is or who Keith Richards is but they have no idea So this purported crime of the century this case that everybody watched even, you know, a short generation ago in the late nineties has almost been forgotten by this [00:01:00] generation.

There's L’Affaire Callieux in France in the summer of 1914, the second wife of the premier of France had shot a newspaper editor and almost all of France was focused on this particular case. They weren't focused on the possible other. real crime of the century, the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which catapulted Europe into two world wars and mass murders across the continent.
Rather, they were obsessed with L’Affaire Calieux, which now has been forgotten. Who knows? But right now, currently the world we're living in, is living in the crime of the century. 12 to 24 million people that have died through and by COVID. And that's a number taken from The [00:02:00] Economist, the British magazine.
They've run all kinds of algorithms on this. They've discovered that the numbers are far, far higher than the World Health Organization's estimate of 5 million, somewhere. Double digit millions could be as high as 24 million, certainly the very lowest is 12 million. It came from a lab. The balance of probabilities is that it came from a lab.

They brought the virus there. They made the virus more virulent to humans. They didn't have effective conditions to keep it inside the laboratory. They didn't have the training or the education for their technicians. And once it got out, they, the communist Chinese, engaged in a cover up that involved the killing of people, the imprisonment of people.

The censorship of [00:03:00] people around the world, if that's not the crime of the century, what is?

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you are in the world. I'm Declan Hill, an associate professor of investigations here at the University of New Haven. And each week myself and my students, and today it's Alexia Miller. We bring you an episode about a crime seen from the eyes of the investigator.
And today that investigator is me. [00:04:00] I spent the last seven months researching the slow motion Chernobyl, the real story of what's happening around us in the COVID epidemic. And I'm bringing it to you with no political spin, no Trump is great or Biden is wonderful stuff, just pure independent bipartisan research.

And there's also no pro vax or anti vax proselytizing. It's just the facts presented. In a simple, clear way, the evidence that often the mainstream media has either downplayed or lost in that 24 7 news cycle.

Back in the day, when I was an investigative journalist, I did a story on the deaths of two young men in a chemical cleanup operation in southern Ontario. It was appalling to save money. The company had not provided proper education or training to their workers. They did not have functioning rescue gear, nor even a proper evacuation plan.

And the result was that these two beautiful young men were killed. [00:05:00] And their bodies were so toxified that they had to be encased in cement. And it's the same thing out of Wuhan on an exponentially much larger scale. As I mentioned before, the Economist magazine out of London estimates that the true death toll is somewhere between 12.7 and 24 million people around the world. So in this show, we're going to look at the slow motion Chernobyl, the industrial accident in the city of Wuhan, which has led to all these deaths. It's a five part series, and part one is the evidence, the facts that have not always been widely reported that indicate that the virus haunting humanity came from the lab.

And note, this is balance of probability stuff. No one has definite evidence. It could have come from a wild animal in nature, but I think when you finish listening to all the facts, all the indications, you'll think that the needle in the balance of probability is towards a lab leak. [00:06:00] is deep in the red zone.

I'll give you just one teaser before we get cracking further. It's to show you the scale of the problems at Chinese medical research laboratories in general. They, the workers in the labs, would sell the animals that they experimented on, you know, that they just pumped full of pathogens and viruses, to the local butchers.
And this wasn't something they did on a couple of times, you know, someone would have a few too many beers and think it was a good idea. This is something that happened so regularly in so many Chinese laboratories that one group made almost 1 million. from selling infected animals to the butchers. I've got the citations.

We're going to put that in because these, these are some of the extraordinary stories are going to emerge in this podcast episode. There'll be lots of citations in the, on the website accompanying this material. So if there's anything that you're doubting, if there's anything like, no, this could not be [00:07:00] possible, go and check there because if you're startled by that story, stick around.

There's going to be far, far more similar facts. You will, I think by the end of this episode, be. Deeply angry. You'll be shocked and you'll be horrified. For none of the conditions that led to the spread of this virus has been stopped, and thus it could happen again. Part two in the series is the Communist Chinese coverup of what I believe given the available evidence was a lab leak.

It was a coverup that involved international film festivals, the enforced imprisonment of dozens of Chinese whistleblowers, and sadly, the World Health Organization part three. is that they were aided by mainstream sections of the Western media, social media companies, and considerable section of our scientific establishment.

We'll break that down in the third episode, [00:08:00] because again, if you don't know the story, it's going to seem like some crazy, wacky conspiracy theory. Once you break it down, once you see what was going on for the first 18 months of the COVID epidemic, again, I think you're going to be deeply angry. Part four is kind of a good news story.

It's the extraordinary story about democratic China, Taiwan, how they warned the world of the epidemic. How they've taken the most effective steps in slowing the spread of the virus and how they've been ignored by much of the world. It's actually an incredible story, for we have been presented with two models coming out of this epidemic.

An authoritarian one from communist China. And a democratic model coming from Taiwan and most countries have signed up for the authoritarian oppressive model, which actually doesn't work all that well. Well, a democratic country came out really early on with a far better model that we've largely and deliberately ignored.[00:09:00] 

The fifth episode in this series is the shocking, creepy tale of bioweapons. And we're not saying that the COVID epidemic is a result of a bioweapons program, but we are saying that bioweapon programs are now weaponizing viruses like COVID, and they're making them genetically targeted to various populations.

So stick around.

In 1986 a Soviet nuclear [00:10:00] plant in Chernobyl, that's now the Ukraine, exploded and there was a massive, dark, toxic cloud of smoke that rolled across the continent and has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. In fact, the human cost of that accident is still being counted. But because it was so big, It was undeniable that didn't stop the communist system, the Soviet system at that time, trying to contain the news.

They tried to censor it. They tried to suppress it. And I believe the same thing, in principle, happened in Wuhan. However, because a laboratory accident can be so discreet, it was deniable. So make no mistake, the balance of probabilities is that this, this epidemic that we're living through was an industrial accident.

And it was so foreseen, it was so preventable, and it was so easy to stop, that it amounts to a [00:11:00] case of criminal manslaughter. Look, actually, that's not fair. It should be labeled criminal, accidental genocide.

The first section is that lab leaks occur all the time. And this really is no news to you if you're a scientist, or a medical student, or a medical researcher. Leaks and problems at laboratories are like accidents at swimming pools. They happen all the time. There's a whole set of safety protocols, training and personnel that you're aware of you know, even when you're doing laps or cooling off at the local pool, you know, there's a risk.

In fact, every time a scientist walks into a laboratory, they're aware of the possibility of contamination and corruption of their experiments. That's why even in the most simple laboratory, students are wearing gloves and masks and basic equipment like a lab coat. [00:12:00] Remember that point because we're going to see a shocking case where even these basic protocols weren't followed in the Wuhan laboratories.

This basic stuff. At higher levels of research, the possibilities of fatal accidents are constantly discussed. In the decades after the second world war, hundreds of research scientists have been severely injured or died in accidents. I mentioned the United States because presumably with the resources, they could both be protected properly and those accidents be properly documented.

But even in that country, our country, America, there have been hundreds of these accidents. In the Soviet Union in 1977, there was an influenza epidemic. It got around the world and killed hundreds of thousands of people. And in the end, the medical detectives traced it to a lab leak from a [00:13:00] test tube, one test tube of a flu virus that the United States had shared with the Moscow Laboratory in 1947.

So somehow, someone, somewhere 30 years later had made a mistake. And thousands of people had died in the UK in the early two thousands. One poor lab researcher was killed from anthrax. And after a major investigation was discovered that one leaky drain pipe had allowed that pathogen to escape in Singapore, that's a country famous for its clean streets and communities.

In the last few years, it's had a number of lab leaks linked to students working on COVID type viruses. So lab leaks occur. So frequently, so often in the decades leading up to 2012, they warned that conditions were so lax in medical research laboratories that if things continued as they [00:14:00] were, note that point, there was going to be an 80 percent chance of a worldwide epidemic of a virus escaping from a lab in the next 12 years.

2012. These guys estimated that there was an 80 percent chance of a worldwide epidemic. So three points in this, and these three points are going to echo through the series. First, lab leaks occur all the time in every country, every culture. Two, this is so well known that every well trained scientist, in fact, every well trained student knows this and wears protective clothing.

And three, This is so common that the danger is so well known that the idea spread very early on in the Covid epidemic by scientists linked to the communist Chinese that discussing the idea that a virus came from a lab leak had to be a quote [00:15:00] conspiracy theory. Is actually so strange and weird, it should have set off a number of alarm bells.

Here's the second headline. Lab leaks occur all the time in China. In 2009 in Beijing, there was a mini outbreak of SARS type virus. That's the essential family of COVID that escaped from one of their laboratories. And these leaks have been helped by appalling conditions and training at Chinese medical research [00:16:00] laboratories.

The professional standards of conduct are so bad that it's almost standard practice for some technicians to sell those poor animals that the lab is conducting their experiments on. You know, injecting them with viruses and deadly pathogens to see how quickly they die. After they're dead. They sell their bodies to local butchers to put in the food supply.

In fact, a group of Chinese lab technicians did this so regularly, they made nearly one million dollars from butchers for supplying them with fresh meat. Just to repeat, this quote, fresh meat came from animals that were stuffed full of dangerous pathogens and virus. Now, you hear that and you think, you know, a fair minded person can say, well, okay, that may be true.

It is. We've got the court documents for it. But we are [00:17:00] talking about the highest research laboratory in China. It was set up in Wuhan. specifically to work on dangerous viruses. So the professional standards there are so much better. If only that were true.

The lab conditions specifically in Wuhan were terrible. Let's look at just the buildings itself. They were commissioned from the French government after the SARS epidemic of 2002. And a quick reminder because that SARS epidemic and the reaction around the world to it is, is overshadows almost everything about our current COVID epidemic.

So in 2002, SARS, a COVID like virus emerges in China and the communist Chinese suppress early news of the virus, which leads to a mini worldwide epidemic. It had particular problems in [00:18:00] Toronto, Canada and Taiwan. So after the epidemic is over, the Chinese go to the French government and they ask for their help in constructing a brand new research laboratory to be set up in Wuhan to study these types of virus.

And this is hugely controversial in France. The French military. Just doesn't want to do it. They claim that in the early 2000s, if they help build this type of facility, it's going to be later taken over by the People's Liberation Army, the PLA, that's the Communist Chinese Army, and they would then transform the bioweapons.

Again, put that in your mind. We'll get to this later. But for whatever reason, in the early 2000s, the French politicians overruled their military and signed a deal with the Chinese communists to build the laboratory in Wuhan. However, the construction that goes on from there, [00:19:00] Is so chaotic and so badly done that when it's finished, they bring in an international company that's supposed to certify the building saying you can safely use this building to research dangerous viruses and that international company just goes, No, we're not going to do it because of something.

It's so possible that there will be a leak from this laboratory and will be sued. If there's a worldwide epidemic, they just walk away. They say, we're not going to certify this building. They pull out. However, the lab's still open. It's still stocked with dangerous viruses. So again, let's just assume, you know, fair minded people.
We're going to critique everything. We're going to make sure that these are robust facts. And we'll say. Okay, who knows, maybe there were politics in this international deal, maybe this company that refused to certify the building, maybe it was like a cultural issue, maybe they were, you know, they're just playing [00:20:00] some political game.

Surely the researchers and the team that was put in that Wuhan laboratory would be the best of the best and, and there was nothing that could happen there. Actually. The standards of professional training inside the Wuhan laboratory were so low that the director of the laboratory themselves applied for international assistance.

It's pretty startling, right? So let's review. First, the lab building itself doesn't get certified by an international company who's originally supposed to do it. Then the person who's in charge of running the entire lab says publicly, To international diplomats, we need help in training our people. This occurred first in January 2018, so two years before the epidemic.

The head of the Wuhan Laboratory meets with officials from the U. S. [00:21:00] State Department, and they say in this meeting specifically, they need help in training the people at the laboratory. And we know this because there's a State Department cable dated January 19th, 2018. It's reported in the Washington Post in April 2020.

And here's a verbatim quote from that cable. During interactions with the scientists at the WIV laboratory, that's the Wuhan Institute, they noted that the new laboratory has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigated needed to safely operate this high containment laboratory.
That sentence, considering what is going to happen two years later, is worth repeating. And this is from an official state department cable after they meet with the head of the laboratory. Quote, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators [00:22:00] needed to safely operate this high containment laboratory.

Now the cable goes on. You know, there's various other bits, but then it goes on, it says, Most importantly, the researchers also show that various SARS like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2. That's the human receptor identified for SARS coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that stars like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS like diseases.

From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS like coronaviruses in bats and studies of the animal human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention. In the language of everybody else, not U. S. State Department lingo. We'd better train these [00:23:00] people, or this can get really bad.

Now, let's look At what was actually going on in the Wuhan laboratory during this crucial time at this point, the lab director that's running the Wuhan research laboratory is so concerned about the standards of professional training and and just standards in their laboratory that not only do they ask the State Department for help, They then write a peer reviewed paper in an internationally available academic journal.

So it's not just within China, it's now internationally available, saying exactly the same thing. Saying they need professional standards of their own lab technicians needed improvement. So, to be clear, This is the person who's in charge of the entire research lab and saying, "Hey, we're not doing too great.
We need some training." [00:24:00] And that's particularly important because of a series of odd events that investigators have uncovered that went on at the laboratory in the months leading up to the outbreak of the epidemic. So, independent investigators have discovered that there were a series of publicly tended contracts from the laboratory between May to November 2019.

And again, these contracts raise circumstantial doubts and questions about what was going on inside that facility. First, there was a cleaning contract for the laboratory that was tendered in May 2019. Okay. Maybe that's nothing wrong, but it's not great news because, you know, you remember that UK laboratory where, where the deadly pathogen anthrax escapes from a leaky drain pipe.

And so it's not great that they need another set of cleaners. But whatever, we'll give them that. But in July 2019, there's a similar [00:25:00] public contract to rebuild the entire ventilation system of the research laboratory. So that's a contract worth millions in dollars. And then a few months later on September.

There's a contract to increase the security at the Wuhan laboratory. Now gotta be fair. We've got to make sure that it's, you know, both sides are represented and the communist Chinese and their supporters claim that these contracts were offered, but the researchers who uncovered them made mistakes in the amount of money in the contracts.

So let's just stick to the facts. One, these are multi million dollar contracts. Two, all these contracts that did happen are later removed from the internet and are only discovered by specific researchers that are able to dig up archives of censured material. [00:26:00] Three, the last contract is offered, you know, the security one, is offered September 12th, 2009.

That's the same day that the entire virus database of the Wuhan laboratory is taken off their website. And to this day, February 2022. It's never again been published in full. Finally, we have, thanks to these brilliant researchers, the summary of a meeting at the Wuhan 2019. And I'm going to give you the verbatim statement.

This is later taken off the internet by the Communist Chinese government. And at the meeting, the deputy director of security, so that's The director of the entire Wuhan said publicly on a number of occasions we have problems of professional standards and training, and this is the deputy director of the security.

He's saying, quote, [00:27:00] a number of common problems that were discovered during the security check in the last year and, quote, that the correction of hidden dangers must take place in a thorough manner. To repeat, the Wuhan security guys are talking about common problems and hidden dangers that they've just discovered.

Those are all facts. And together they, they beg that question of what exactly was going on inside that laboratory where they're replacing the ventilation system, they're replacing the cleaners, they're boosting their security, they're removing their entire viral database from public. accountability and review.

This is particularly important because many researchers for example, congressional, U. S. congressional at their foreign affairs committee [00:28:00] have said publicly they think the virus actually leaked out of the Wuhan laboratory during this time. Months before the communist Chinese government admitted that it was even a problem, somehow the virus had leaked.

Let's throw in one more final fact. We're now in January 2020. The world is beginning to wake up to the problems that COVID is going to cause. And the communist Chinese government removes the director of the Wuhan laboratory. So this is the same person who had appealed for better training and professional standards.

It kind of goes like, if the lab had nothing to do with this outbreak, you know, it's all a natural occurring virus from an animal, why are you bothering to remove the director? If the laboratory had nothing to do with the epidemic, why remove the director whose research is on this exact subject? Why [00:29:00] replace them when presumably all that research is going to be key in helping end this epidemic?

Okay, let's take a moment to balance the sides here. Because so far we've only examined the facts around the possibility of COVID starting in a laboratory. And there are lots of people that say that's impossible. And a lot of those are either paid by or connected to the Communist Chinese. But A lot of them are not.

Those scientists argue in [00:30:00] good faith that the COVID virus must have occurred in nature and that the events of the last two years and the 12 to 24 million deaths are an unfortunate but utterly non preventable accident. Here's their argument. They claim that In this generation, the great new purges of humanity occur when nature and humanity collide on the edges of urban development, where, for example, a previously unknown jungle pathogen like Ebola comes in contact with humans.

So, the area where SARS viruses occur most naturally are in the mountains of Yunnan. Which is approximately 1, 200 kilometers, that's about 800 miles, from the city of Wuhan. And so if you're an American, that's about the distance from, say, central grizzly bear territory of the Appalachian Mountains to central Manhattan, New York City.

The virus, let's just [00:31:00] say, the virus occurs in grizzly bears in those Appalachian Mountains. But by sheer chance, the first place And this is the nature people's argument, that that virus is actually seen, is on the streets of Manhattan. Totally coincidentally, just a few hundred yards from the only laboratory where they're doing experiments on grizzly bear viruses.

So, back to China, because this is Even more strange for those people who are arguing that this was a naturally occurring virus epidemic, is that in the two years since the virus first was identified and seen and caused this epidemic, and despite tens of thousands of experiments at the cost of tens of millions of dollars, For the communist Chinese government, no one has found anyone or any animal anywhere in that 800 [00:32:00] mile, 1200 kilometer journey from the mountains to Wuhan, who was positive of the virus before it showed up on the streets of Wuhan.

Now look, we, we are going to do what many have not done. We're going to remain rational. We're going to say, look, that could have happened. Stranger, more improbable things have occurred in nature. But really, the choice is that it comes from mountains five states away, and hundreds of miles, and no one in between catching the virus, or it comes from the lab down the street.

Now, the natural occurring proponents respond by saying, well, how could it have come from those mountains? It's a mystery. It's impossible for a virus to travel that far without a bridging gap, an animal somehow. Actually there is a way of getting deadly viruses from the mountains of Yunnan to the city streets of Wuhan.
Because the [00:33:00] researchers at the laboratory in Wuhan brought them, they went out and deliberately sought deadly viruses in remote places, brought them to their laboratory, which their director was on a public record as saying had low professional standards and inadequate education, and they even filmed themselves doing it.

In 2012, that's the same year the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in their journal warned about a worldwide epidemic starting in a laboratory, a bunch of miners were sent into a bat cave in the Yunnan mountains of China, and their job was to harvest bat poo to turn it into fertilizer. And so with the usual lack of care for worker safety shown in communist China you know, their coal mines have accident rates like a Hollywood horror movie.

The miners had no effective equipment, and six of them die from a mysterious ailment that seems to [00:34:00] doctors a lot like SARS. The Wuhan researchers hear about this fatal illness. And they go to the same caves and they collect bat poo, bat saliva, and the bats themselves. In fact, they even film themselves doing so, and they put it on the internet in a kind of heroes of the revolution type video.
You know, good communist scientists on the cutting edge of research, turning back the frontier of ignorance. Here's the problem. Some of the time They did it without masks. Heck, some of the time they were filmed not even wearing protective gloves. You remember at the top of the episode we spoke about how every high school student who does lab experiments is taught to wear proper gear?

Well, in some of these films, you'll see researchers not wearing gloves or mask as they catch, collect, or collate these hazardous materials that have already resulted in the deaths of six minors. [00:35:00] Now, this isn't to say that All the Wuhan researchers are dressed inappropriately. Some of them do have state of the art equipment.

But remember, all it takes to start a worldwide epidemic is for one unlucky researcher to be bitten by a bat. And then they go outside and they inadvertently spread the disease that kills millions of people.

Hey, it's Declan here, just taking a moment from this episode about the start of the COVID epidemic to do a call to [00:36:00] action. And just to let you know, if you want to comment, correct, or congratulate, please drop us a line in the space at the bottom of your screen. If you like this show, please pass it on to a friend.
And, and, and particularly if you found something that We've said, which is inaccurate or, or untrue, let us know, we want to get this right. This COVID epidemic, as, as you've heard, has caused millions, tens of millions of our, of our people to die. Too much of the discussion has become partisan. It's pro Trump, anti Trump, pro Biden, whatever.

We want to avoid all that. We want to get the facts right. And everything that we're doing is to make sure it gets right. So please, if you find anything. Let us know. And if you like it, you love it, subscribe and let more people know. Anyway, back to the episode. So at this point, I'm going to skim down a whole host of virus research discussion.

You know, my [00:37:00] expertise is organized crime, but I've spent months following the debate, reading the literature, and I'm going to summarize. Possibly unfairly all the debate between the virus experts and again to be accurate Many virus experts who are not paid by the communist chinese claim that despite everything that i've said being true The viruses had to come from nature, but even they will admit this one fact, there's something strange about the COVID virus, something very strange.

Remember, it's supposed to be a virus that has emerged from a bat or a similar animal, but the one other being on this world that it most easily transmits to human beings. That's strange, isn't it? I mean, you'd think that a virus that emerges from a bat, the next easiest animal that it would transmit to would be, I don't know, a marsupial, or whatever animal is closest to the [00:38:00] bat on the animal hierarchy.

But no. Strangely, it makes an enormous jump. The viral equivalent of traveling from the Appalachian, Yunnan mountains, to Manhattan, Wuhan. without trace. It jumps to human beings. And the problem for the natural occurring theorist is actually there's a very easy explanation as to why a virus might jump all those different species to human beings.

And that explanation is because the virus was engineered to do precisely that. You remember that team from Wuhan, you know, they go the thousand kilometers, they go to the Wuhan mountains, they harvest dangerous viruses, sometimes they're not even wearing gloves or masks. Okay, they bring all that material back to Wuhan, and then they spend the next eight years working on these already dangerous viruses to make them [00:39:00] more dangerous to humans.
This is what the scientists call gain of function. It's an innocent sounding name for a terrifying proposition. Scientists took already existing deadly viruses and made them more harmful, more transmittable to humans in their laboratory. And to be fair, this was a massively controversial issue in the scientific community long before the COVID epidemic started.

You remember that article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from May 2012 that said there'd be an epidemic within 12 years? Well, actually what they said in the article was that with normal lab conditions and leak rates, there would be a serious worldwide epidemic coming from a lab. within about 500 years.
However, with this new gain of function research, it would exponentially shorten that time to 12 years. So [00:40:00] many researchers thought this kind of work was stark, staring lunacy, that these gain of function guys were playing with millions of human lives with only the protection of laboratories that had already proven to be fallible.

In fact, gain of function was declared so dangerous that the administration of President Barack Obama in the United States banned it. So what did its proponents, these, in my opinion, crazed, Dr. Viral Frankensteins do? Well, They did what many American corporations and industry have done. They offshored their production and their research to communist China.

And the central place where this dangerous research was conducted, the Wuhan labs. And by the way, when I say the Wuhan labs, I don't just mean The main laboratory, you remember all of this, we've gone through it in the episode, laboratory that was built with the help of the French, but it didn't meet international certification protocols, whose own [00:41:00] director said publicly how badly trained their people were, who had a series.

Of, and I'm quoting the words of their deputy security director, common problems and hidden dangers. The same lab that replaced its entire ventilation system, its security system, and deleted its viral database just months before an international epidemic was discovered down the road, it gets worse. You see, that lab was the gold standard.

That lab was the best place in town. But the Wuhan researchers were doing experiments on COVID viruses in labs with much lower safety standards. They were so arrogant, so unaware of the dangers of what they were doing, that they conducted research experiments on COVID viruses in laboratories in Wuhan with safety to standard [00:42:00] protocols.

That's about the same level that you'd get in an average Western dental office. In fact, so oblivious to these dangers that a number of Wuhan researchers have published. Peer reviewed journal articles and doctoral thesis stating Hey, thanks very much. I conducted my COVID virus research in these standard two laboratories.

Let's be very clear. There were brave, decent, intelligent people in Wuhan who said very early on that the COVID virus was deadly. That the epidemic had started in a laboratory and that something needed to be done to protect the world from this appalling mistake. These were, were doctors on the front lines of the operating theaters and emergency rooms who were blowing the whistle.

There were Wuhan that the safety standards in their laboratory had led [00:43:00] to this work. There were Chinese researchers who advanced the theory of a lab leak and tried desperately to preserve the inconvenient, but true, documents and viral patterns on the internet. The one common link between them all?

Almost every single one of these people has been killed, imprisoned, or 
disappeared by the communist state. And it's they we should remember in our next episode, we're going to examine their story and how the communist Chinese began the big lie to make sure they would never have to face the consequences of their own inactions that have led to 12 to 24 million deaths around the world.
Stay tuned.