Declan Hill: Covid - The Slow-Motion Chernobyl: Part 2 - The Big Lie

The Head of the CIA has just announced - finally! - that Covid originated from the Wuhan Laboratory Complex.  

Finally - because this is what we at CrimeWaves said three years ago.  At that point, we were shadow banned and censored on both Twitter and LinkedIn at the time of broadcast.  

This is the re-release of our series 'The Slow-Motion Chernobyl'.  It tells the story  of the origin of the disease in a ridiculously stupid playing-at-God scientific experiment, the shockingly bad conditions inside Chinese research labs and the world censorship that took in Hollywood, academic articles and book publishing. 

This episode is particularly painful. It tells the story of the Chinese citizens who risked their lives to tell the truth about Covid. 

The world has, largely, forgotten their sacrifices. 

Listen and be shocked and moved by their courage.

**

These are the photos of Chinese whistleblowers and citizen journalists. 
All of them, and thousands more, have gone to prison camps because they wanted to bring you the truth about the appalling conditions in Wuhan during the early days of Covid. 
We examine the massive Communist Chinese campaign of disinformation - The Big Lie.  It stretches from the hospitals and laboratories of Wuhan, to Chinese prison-camps, to international film festivals, western social media companies and to the World Health Organization.  
All to make sure there is little informed debate about why the Covid epidemic occurred and how we can stop from happening again. 

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

Part 2 - The Big Lie (Communist Chinese Cover-Up)



In late-December 2019, Doctor Li Wenliang was a medical professional pressed into service against a mysterious new malady in Wuhan, China. A virus was spreading across the city.  The hospital emergency rooms were packed with sick and dying patients.  
To better protect doctors, nurses and the patients. Dr. Li told his colleagues on a private social media post that - “the latest news is, it has been confirmed that they are coronavirus infections…”
Within three days, Communist Chinese Party officials had him detained and forced to sign an apology for "publishing untrue statements”.
Within a month Li Wenliang was dead.  He was one of the first wave of tens-of-millions of people killed either by the Covid virus directly or indirectly from delayed operations, social conditions or suicide. 
The cause of this epidemic was - in all probability - an industrial accident from a nearby research laboratory.  But to make sure that the world did not know.  The Communist Chinese officials heightened this campaign of disinformation - that had targeted Dr. Li. 
From the the laboratories and hospitals of Wuhan to the halls and offices of the World Health Organization to international film festivals the Communist Chinese regime has set up an aggressive campaign to stop any discussion that the epidemic was caused by a near-criminal-level of malfunction at their laboratories.

The Slow-Motion Chernobyl

"We keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor. And our faith in socialism will always be rewarded. We seal off the city, no one leaves. And cut the phone lines, contain the spread of misinformation. Yes, Comrades ... we will all be rewarded for what we do here tonight.”

There is a scene in the superb HBO series - Chernobyl.  It was, held deep in the bowels of the nearby Communist party headquarters as the local nuclear power plant is exploding into flames.   To be clear, this was a fictional scene but it encapsulated the original Soviet attitude to this accident.  The main concern of the local officials was not evacuation or protecting children but making sure that any news was silenced.   Now that eventually became impossible. The Chernobyl industrial accident produced a massive cloud of black smoke and radioactive toxicity that was detected thousands of miles away.  
However, a lab leak from a research laboratory can be utterly unnoticed.   A cleaner does not wash their hands quite as throughly as they are supposed to…and a world-wide epidemic is born that kills millions of people. 
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are in the world welcome to Crimewaves.  My name is Declan Hill.  I am an associate professor of investigations at the University of New Haven and each week myself and my students - and today its the brilliant Alexia Miller - we bring you some of the world’s best investigators.
Today, its the story of our times.  A possible contender for the crime of the century.  In February 2022, the balance of probabilities is very clear.  The Covid epidemic, responsible according to The Economist Intelligence Unit in London for tens-of-millions of deaths, is the result of the largest industrial accident in the history of humanity.
Two quick notes before we get started.  You will notice that throughout the series we speak of the “Communist Chinese”.  We do this for accuracy. This not a dig at Chinese culture or history.   The government and officials of current Chinese are all part of system of original Marxist-Leninism.    You will hear about the Taiwanese - the democratic opponents to the Communist system. You will hear about many individual Chinese who have shown extraordinary bravery in the face of an appalling epidemic and a brutal, political system. 
Two, This is, obviously, a massively political story here in the United States.  Almost any discussion of Covid instantly falls into an argument about the merits of the former President or his public health aide or whether the current president is a doing a good job or has failed. If you are listening to this podcast outside America, then there are similar acrimonious debates about your politicians.
I want to avoid all those questions.    So in this episode, you will not hear any discussion about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, Boris Johnson or Justin Trudeau.   This is not to say that these debates do not have merit.  Its just that the story that we are examining - the probable -  greatest industrial accident in the history of humanity is too big to be sidetracked by partisan discussion.
What we at Crimewaves are presenting are just the facts - controversial though they may… Just an investigation into what - - the balance of probabilities indicates occurred: there was some kind of Slow-Motion Chernobyl:  some form of  industrial accident sometime in the summer of 2019, and a dangerous, virulent virus, leaked from one of the research laboratories in the city of Wuhan. 

The Danger of Labs

As we saw in the first episode in this series, there have always been research mishaps and accidents in laboratories around the world. 
In 2014, someone forgot vials full of small pox in a research centre near Washington. 
In 2015, the US military accidentally shipped live anthrax samples to nine American labs and a South Korean military base.
In 2004, in Beijing there was an accidental leak of a Covid virus that infected dozens of people and killed one researcher.  The leak came about because the lab was so over-crowded, so badly run that they kept a vial of the deadly virus in an unsecured fridge in the hallway.   
These shoddy conditions are typical in some Chinese medical laboratories.   In other labs, the technicians sell the infected animals, dosed with pathogens and viruses to the local butchers.  In one case, they made almost one-million dollars from doing this… 
In the specific Wuhan research labs where the leak, in all probability occurred, - “the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory…” 
Those aren’t the words of Declan Hill and the Crimewave producers.  Those are the words of U.S. diplomats in January 2018 - two years before the epidemic outbreak - when they visited the Wuhan labs and spoke to senior scientists who appealed for their help in training staff. 
This is the same lab that was not certified by an international company for insurance upon its completion.  Also in October 2019, two months before the world first became aware of the virus, the Deputy Security official at this lab spoke about ‘common problems’ and ‘hidden dangers’   that had been discovered at the lab.  It may have been why there were also a series of expensive contracts to renovate the cleaning, security and ventilation systems of the laboratory in the months leading up to the discovery of the epidemic.
Some of the viruses at the laboratory were brought from bat caves, hundred miles away in the Mountains of the Yunnan province of southern China.  Three miners had died in these caves from a disease linked to bats.  The Wuhan researchers went to those caves and collected the bats, their faeces and saliva. However, even in the collection of those potentially dangerous specimens - they showed extraordinary lax standards:  collecting and dealing with potential death-bringing samples and animals, sometimes, without masks or gloves.
The database of viruses that they worked with at the lab was, strangely, removed from their website on September 2019,  a month after the contract for a new ventilation system was announced and one month before the security official announced that there were “common problems” and “hidden dangers” at the lab. 
Now, to be fair -  for balance - the believers of the theory that Covid occurred naturally in the wild - say that all those incidents and others are just an enormous chain of circumstantial events. They say that because diseases like Ebola, MERS and SARS came from nature, thus, so too, must Covid.
The problem for them is that while these other epidemics did come from the intersection between nature and humanity be it in the jungles of Liberia or the mountains of Yunnan.  The first finding of Covid was on the city streets of Wuhan - hundreds of miles from nature but hundreds of yards from research lab where scientists were researching Covid viruses.  
The second claim of the defenders of a natural origin claim is that if such a discrete accident occurred at laboratory it must have been covered up by a vast conspiracy that would involve tens-of-thousands of Communist party officials and their supporters around the world.  And such an enormous campaign is simply not possible.
Well …Actually it is… There has been a massive pr campaign of disinformation - The Big Lie - that has stretched from the streets of Wuhan, to Chinese prison-camp gulags, to glamorous international film festivals to the meeting rooms of the World Health Organization itself.  
Before we examine into this campaign of disinformation a quick review to gain perspective as to who are the Communist Chinese?

One of the Greatest Killers of Humanity

In the annals of humanity there have been a series of great killers.  The Black Death - the bubonic plague in 1347-49 that killed an estimated 1/3rd of all people living on the world at that time.   There are maps of just one county in England - Dorset - where the archaeologists estimate that over-sixty so called “plague villages” just ceased, either abandoned or everyone died in them.  
There were the Mughals - the Dothraki people - Mongol Empire of Kubla and Genghis Khan who mutilated and killed tens-of-millions of people to build an empire from eastern Europe to southern China on the ruins and bones of far more civilized peoples.
And there are the Communist Chinese.  Its difficult to overstate what a blood-thirsty, deranged force they have been.   
Mao Tse-tung, their first, Great Leader, was a true abomination of a man. He led the killing of at least 30 million of his people. This was partly good old-fashioned massacring of his political opponents - intellectuals, union leaders, priests, journalists, professors, academics, artists.  Yet it did not stop there.  His moon-crazed idea - The Great Leap Forward between 1956 - 61 - was an economic plan for the country so bizarre that some where between 30 and 95 million people died.   Those numbers are so great that there are academic conferences where they argue over an uncertainty gap greater than the holocausts of Stalin and Hitler combined.  Remember those plague-villages of rural England after the Black Death?    Part of the problem is that that Mao-made famines were so great that entire provinces died off so there are no records to examine.   Some academics say (and this is a paraphrase of a complicated argument), “well there were x million people in this area in 1949, and there were no records in 1962…” that means that all of them died.
Mao was not finished with that catastrophe,  He next launched the ‘Cultural Revolution’ - where he lived in a luxurious palace protected by units of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). His doctor would later write that he had syphilis so badly that puss ran out of his penis, but it did not stop him from having a harem of 15-year-old girls.  Meanwhile, China was out of control.  Somewhere between 1 to 5 million people were killed in the Cultural Revolution for not showing sufficient loyalty to the Great Leader.

Two essential points about our current situation:

1. Around Mao was a whole series of craven enablers, PLA generals, high Communist Party officials who connived and aided the brutality against their own people.  Is their sons and daughters who now control the government of China.  They have not changed. 

2. The people most often targeted by the Communist Chinese for deliberate killing is anyone capable of independent, critical thinking.  Intellectuals, artists, academics and most importantly scientists were taught - very forcibly - that there was only one ‘correct’ way of thinking and that was the Communist Party’s thinking.

Given this horrific system of terror it is extraordinary that anyone would dare speak out about anything that the Communist Chinese forbid
There is an archipelago of prison camps across modern-day China. In them are millions of people - intellectuals, journalists, Falun Gong practitioners, peoples whose races are deemed inconvenient or not fully equal with Han Chinese - Tibetans, Uighurs and other ethnic groups.   
And there is a small group of whistleblowers who revealed with what was actually going on in Wuhan…  
This is their story… 


Bravery in the Face of Disease

“It was a baffling high fever.  The medicines used throughout didn’t work. and his temperate didn’t move…. We watched more and more patients come in as he radius of the spread of the infection became larger… I knew there must be human to human transmission…” 

Those are the words of Dr. Ai Fen - Head of the Emergency at the Wuhan Central Hospital. It was late December 2019. The Covid epidemic in Wuhan was beginning to overwhelm the hospitals.  But it was still another six weeks before the World Health Organization would announce that there was a problem and 12 weeks before they would declare it a pandemic…

As Dr. Ai and her team desperately fought against the mysterious disease. Her medical tests of her patients were being censored.   She said in an extraordinary open interview a few months later to a Chinese media outlet that the positive test results were sent to high-party officials but not to her or other front-line doctors. 

On January 1st - she was expressly censored because she had warned her colleagues that they were dealing with a SARS-like virus not a common pneumonia.  The CCP would continue to downplay possible human-to-human transmission for almost another three weeks, meanwhile the virus ricochetted around the world.

Now began an extraordinary tale of courage.  Citizen journalists sprang into action and began reporting on the story that the official CCP media would not tell.   

I will read their words directly… to show them the honour that their courage deserves.  I take the translations from the excellent book by Australian journalist Sharri Markson - “What Really Happened in Wuhan’…

“Why do i come here? My duty is a reporter for citizens. As a reporter, if you don’t dare to come to the front line at the first moment when there is a catastrophe, how can you be called a real reporter?  Therefore I took the last high-speed train to Wuhan.”

That is Chen Qiushi - a lawyer turned journalist.  
Its a good rebuke to most of the ‘mainstream media’ who spent the next two years of Covid hiding behind their computer screens at home, missing real journalism when their country needed them most.  This generation of journalists meekly accepted their role as court appointed stenographers.    In China Chen Qiushi proved them wrong and showed what a real journalist does… 

“If, unfortunately, I become infected, I will accept my fate.  I’d rather die in the city than flee from Wuhan. The current outbreak is comparable to the SARS outbreak in 2003.  In the two outbreaks, it is the cover-up of the truth and the block of the information that leads to both of the outbreaks.  We cannot make the same mistakes over and over again. At least, we can allow the news and information to be spoken out and spread. If we spread the news and information faster than the virus does, then we can win this war.”


Note - Chen Qiushi’s work was in direct opposition to the WHO.  It was in direct opposition to the Communist politicians in Wuhan. On January 18, they had a massive banquet with 40,000 invited participants; all to celebrate their Communist achievements.  All while their city was just about to go into full epidemic lock down. 
Chen Qiushi visits - Dr. AI Fen’s - Wuhan Central Hospital.  He is wearing a paper mask and swimming goggles to protect himself against this unknown virus.   There is vomit on the floor.  Sick Patients everywhere. Then he goes to the Eleventh Hospital - the same scenes of chaos.  There are screams that they are out of medicine.  Patients lying on stretchers in the hallways. Chen Qiushi:

“Initially, I thought it was someone lying there receiving intravenous injection.  Then I looked from the other side. I realized that the patient’s face was covered by a white cloth, without breath. That must be a corpse.”

He interviews a nurse:

“The entire hallway was stuffed with patients. Couldn’t even move.  Must have been more than a thousand patients.  We were so nervous then. That was great pressure. We were crying all the time during those days.”

For the next two weeks, Chen Qiushi continues to report about the chaos and that the central government has screwed up their response to the disaster. Remember at this time, the CCP is claiming that only a few hundred people are ill and they are still allowing international flights out of Wuhan despite an internal lock-down of the city. Thereby, allowing the spread of the disease around the world. 
With his unfiltered videos he is gaining an audience of millions, so the police step in.
In one of his last videos Chen Qiushi says the following, “I am scared. I have the virus in front of me. Behind me is China’s law enforcement. If I am still alive in this city. I will continue my report.  Fuck you, I’m not even scared of death.  You think I’m scared of you, Chinese Communist Party.”
A few days later, Chen Qiushi is disappeared by Chinese officials.
In our next episode, we will explore how many western social media companies like LinkedIn and Facebook - have joined the CCP in restricting debate about this issue.   By the way, if you want to follow him or subscribe to his videos on the ostensibly free-speech bastion YouTube, they are behind a wall because they may offend “community standards”.  Of course, on YouTube, you can find teenage girls in bikinis, primers on sports gambling and speeches of the Taliban leaders but a video from a man who is dragged off to a Communist prison camp for revealing the true conditions of the Wuhan epidemic: offensive to “community standards”.
Unbelievably, someone comes to replace him.  Not a western journalist but a Chinese journalist. 25-year-old Li Zehua resigns his on-air position on Beijing television and smuggles himself into Wuhan explicitly to take up where Chen Qiushi left off. The courage is extraordinary. LI Zehua knew what had happened to Chen, yet he kept on. His words:

“Now all the bad news about the epidemic has been censored by the central government. The local media can only report good news. They don’t want us to know what we want to know. This is why I’m here. I have to use my eyes and ears to catch information and make the judgement.” 

Li Zehua goes to funeral homes in Wuhan and discovers that the death toll is far higher than the official count.  “When I left, the boiler in this funeral home seems to be still working. The boom is loud.”  
Its 11.00 pm and they are still working.
Then Li Zehua, makes a mistake, he visits the Wuhan Virology Laboratory.   The one where the security official had spoken about “common problems” and “hidden dangers”.  He only parks outside their front doors for a few minutes but the police track him down to his hotel room.  As they are outside the door, Zehua live streams, 

“Theres no chance to run away and this is not what I planned to do. It would be absolutely false if I say I’m not scared now. But what does it matter whether I fear or not?  If they want to get me arrested they will do. Before coming here, I had expected that I would eventually end up like him (Chen Qiushi) but i didn’t see it would come so fast.” 

Li Zehua was arrested and then disappeared for six weeks.  He has not spoken publicly since his detention by Communist authorities. 
There was also the case of Fang Bin, a local businessman, who took his mobile phone to the hospitals recording scenes of chaos:  “Five, six, seven, eight, eight… bodies in five minutes. So many dead.”



























Within days Fang  Bin was also arrested.   And he was also disappeared.  Unlike Li Zehua He  has still not been accounted for. Fang Bin is, presumably, either dead or in some gulag prison camp.  His last words on his last video were a short note, “Let all citizens resist. Power to the people.” 
In February 2022, we still do not know what has happened Fang Bin.
We do know what is happening to another citizen journalist Zhang Zhan.  She came to Wuhan and continued to show the corruption and incompetence of the response by the authorities.  For her reporting from Wuhan Zhang Zhan was arrested, tortured for three months.  She now weighs less than ninety pounds and her family does not expect her to survive the winter.  The last time they say they saw her, her wrists were shackled and she was so weak she could barely speak.
Her crime? 
According to the Communist officials “picking quarrels” and “provoking trouble”.
Similar charges were brought against Professor Xu Zhiyong who wrote an online essay attacking Premier Xi Jinpiang, “You didn’t authorize the truth to be released and the outbreak turned into a national disaster.  Please step down.”
Arrested. Detained.
Another Professor XU Zhangrun - wrote a similar essay calling for freedom of speech around national health emergencies - “Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear.”  He was fired from his job and placed under house arrest.
Cai Wei, Chen Mei and Tang Hongbo were all arrested.  Not for speaking out.  But from trying to stop officially-sanctioned technological amnesia.  They tried to save documents about the epidemic from the Internet that the Communist Party officials were deleting.  
“It has been months since he was arrested but we still don’t know where he is… I’m  worried about my parents and security and my family, my wife, my daughter and me our security.”  Said Cai Wei’s brother in 2021.  His appeal to westerners?  “Don’t forget them.  More and more people know about them, the more and more people call on the Chinese government to release them.” 
Chinese human rights observers estimates that over five thousand people have been detained for speaking about the real conditions of the Covid epidemic in China.  All under the spurious charges of “Spreading rumours”… “harming stability”…. “picking quarrels” “Causing trouble”.
The lucky few - like Chen Qiuling - have after months, or in his case one-and-a-half years in detention - have been released. They then begin the Peng Shuai Dance. The female tennis star who posted that she had been sexually assaulted by a senior Communist Party official on social media.  Within minutes her post was taken down and she is now trotted out in heavily restricted public appearances to reassure the western media that ‘all is well’.  Meanwhile, in Chinese media she has virtually disappeared.

Hollywood and the Communist Chinese

Some of the footage that these citizen journalist,  and others, filmed, went into a brilliant documentary Coronation: Wuhan by the Chinese equivalent to  Banksie - artist - Ai Weiwei..  The documentary is superb. There is no narration.  Just direct person to viewer speech of what is life like under a Covid epidemic in Communist China. The incompetence, the bewilderment of people and the terror of the authorities.  
You might think this would be one of the most important films of 2020 - the year of pandemic.   Original footage from the literal ground zero of the place where Covid began.  However, if you are an international film festival executive you would say that is wrong.  
According to the exceptional Geneva International Film Festival and Ai Weiwei himself, festivals in New York, Colorado and Toronto all expressed interest in showing the film.  The usual streaming services also expressed an strong interest… Then, when they heard that the Communist Party of China would not like it, they dropped the film. 
This censorship of Hollywood and the film industry is another sign of our times.   Even the hugely popular Marvel Comic Universe by Disney has changed characters and scripts.  Removing any mention of Tibet so as not to upset the Chinese Communists.
In August 2020, the writer’s group PEN - published a 70-page report - ‘Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing: The U.S. Film Industry and Chinese Government Influence’.    They write, 

“… this type of influence has increasingly become normalized in Hollywood…. Hollywood is one of the world’s most significant storytelling centers, a cinematic powerhouse whose movies are watched by millions across the globe. And yet the choices it makes, about which stories to tell and how to tell them, are increasingly influenced by an autocratic government with the world’s most comprehensive system of state-imposed censorship…
The free expression implications of this fact are significant, and far-reaching. By influencing which stories Hollywood tells, the Chinese government can soften the edges or erase depictions of its human rights abuses; it can dampen movies’ call for change or encouragement of resistance in the face of oppression; and it can discourage or silence filmmakers interested in making movies that question or critique the Chinese government… 
Today, Hollywood enjoys a reputation as a place uncowed by Washington, and one that is often gleefully willing to speak truth to American political power. This reputation contrasts strangely but silently with Hollywood’s increasing acceptance of the need to conform to Beijing’s film dictates.” 


Chinese Whistleblower on Covid Origins
At this point, a fair minded listener may say, ‘well hang on!  That is Hollywood and everyone knows how corrupt the movie-making industry is…  And those awful cases of people being detained for reporting of the disaster that was the communist party response to the epidemic… but it doesn’t speak to the cause of the epidemic.  Li Zehua parked in front of the Wuhan lab and was arrested a few hours later but that is not an insight into the lab….
Actually, there were a number of people in Communist China who did speak out about the conditions inside the Wuhan virus research community.  Here is one that appeared on Weibo - Chinese social media - at 11.51 a.m.on  February 17, 2020.  
“Hello everyone, my name is Chen Quanjiao, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, my national ID number is 422.428.197.404.086.26.  I hereby report that the virus was leaked by Wang Yanyi, director of the P4 Wuhan Institute of Virology.  She has little knowledge of medicine. While at Beida University, which enrols students only of high ability, other researchers did her research for her. She often sells animals used on experiments in the lab to game meat vendors in the South China Seafood markets. She is the culprit of the epidemic and her husband has brothers/ friends who have grown up playing with a certain deputy state-level official. We must not forget Wang Yanyi, how many innocent people she has killed, and the lives lost.” 
As with the tennis start Peng Shuai, the post was taken down within minutes.  An official rebuttal of the accusation was sent out by the Wuhan Lab but up to now there has never been a television interview or even any official, independent investigation of this case.  
It was odd because that post followed a series on Chinese social media from a purported biologist called Dr Wu Xiaohua who posted this on February 7:

“For instance, some researchers in these labs kept the laboratory dogs as pets; some disposed of animal carcasses casually because following the biosafety rules and cremating them costs a lot of money. Some cut up the laboratory pigs and took the meat home to eat. I know this happened at Beijing 301 Hospital’s spine surgery lab. Worst of all, some laboratory animals were sold to wet markets as wild-caught animals for profit.”

Xu Bo, a well-known IT magnate and billionaire in China, cited reports and articles to support Wu’s statements. Xu and many other Chinese netizens say they suspect that the novel coronavirus is a genetically engineered virus that somehow escaped from Wuhan P4 Biosafety lab.

What happened to Huang Yangling?

There is also the odd case of - What happened to Huang Yangling?   She was a Masters student at the BSl-3 lab so not the main one but the laboratory with much lower safety standards where according to a number of prominent international researchers no one should ever have been doing research on Covid. 
The place where in June 2019, six months before we knew about the epidemic, they advertised a contract to get rid of the hazardous waste that had been building up at the lab.  In the contract papers, it stated that there was two-tons of hazardous waste as none of it had been disposed of since 1994.   
On the Chinese version of the Internet in February 2020, there was a rumour that Huang Yangling had been ‘patient zero’ and that she had then ‘disappeared.  
Angry denunciations, followed from senior laboratory officials.  They denied that she had worked in the lab for the last six years. Then Internet sleuths discovered a photo of her at the lab three years after that date.  Then the officials denied that anyone at the laboratories had ever tested positive for Covid.  Another Internet sleuth pointed out that this was statistically so improbable given the Covid infection rates in Wuhan in general… that it was an obvious lie.  
Whatever the truth, two things emerged from Huang Yangling case:  

i. The Communist Chinese denied and delayed any discussion of Huang Yangling. They never produced an alive former research student or even a credible video interview of her.

ii. This matter was investigated and taken seriously by the U.S. National Institute of Health tasked scientist to find out what had happened to this disappeared member of a Wuhan lab.

iii. There were other Wuhan Covid scientists that have disappeared just as oddly.  There may, of course, be an innocent explanation. Although given the severity of the situation it does seem odd that if they could, the Communist Chinese would not simply show that these people were alive.  The second case is Zhou Yusen. He also was a researcher in Wuhan. In fact, his name is on the the first anti-Covid vaccine ever patented in February 2020.   He died three months later but there was no obituary.  

Just to repeat that fact.  The Communist Chinese despite numerous examples of refusing to share information with the international public health community had an early prototype of a vaccine ready in weeks.  Yet the researcher who discovered this vaccine was dead soon afterwards and no Communist official bothered to announce that fact. 
Why not?
Here is a February 6, 2020 article from two relatively prominent Chinese scientists Dr Botao Xiao, who had just completed a post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School and is wife Dr. Lei Xiao.   They wrote, “The killer coronavirus probably emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan.” Interestingly, these two well-connected scientists drew attention to the BSL-3 laboratory in the city.  “It hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification.”  They also write that one of the researchers at that lab, “He was once attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him.” 
Their article disappeared within hours and Dr. Xiao wrote to the Wall Street Journal, a few weeks later, claiming that the article had merely been speculation. 
Perhaps the greatest question of this early Covid time comes from the current Great Leader of the Communist Chinese.  The politician who has most pushed to be seen as Mao II - Xi Jinping.  On February 14, 2020 - six weeks after Taiwan had announced the impending pandemic - the South China Morning Post based in the still relatively-free Hong Kong, wrote of a speech where Premier Xi spoke of “lessons learned” “shortcomings” and “leaking holes” in China’s management of biological materials and security systems.  He was doing so in a speech to promulgate a new Biosafety Law.
All of this begs the question - what were these “lessons”, “short comings” and “leaking holes” that they discovered?
No answer was ever given.  

References

Much of the above work is written about in two books. First,  Sharri Markson’s superb - ‘What Happened in Wuhan’ and the equally interesting, ‘Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19’ by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley. Strong recommendation for both of these books.
In the next episode of this series, we will look at how the nearest - known - virus to Covid-19 - was found in the database of the Wuhan Institute not by their own researchers but by other, independent researchers on the Internet.  They found that the Wuhan scientists had made mysterious changes, deletions and re-classifications to the work. We  want to emphasize the role of these independent, international researchers. There is a dedicated team that has done extraordinary, non-funded work to uncovered so much of what we know went on in the Wuhan laboratories. 
We will also examine the question of why the origins of the epidemic have not been properly investigated by the organization that is supposed to be in charge of controlling global disease - the World Health Organization (The WHO).  
This is where it gets shocking for anyone who, liked myself, believed in the sanctity of international organizations.  
So come back and listen.  In the meantime, if you have found this useful please recommend our podcast to your friends, pass it around - write comments… subscribe - take action!  This is, most probably, the largest criminal cover-up of our times. We need to be speaking, discussing and debating it. 
Thank you for listening. See you on the next episode.