Episode 33: COVID-19 Was Engineered in a Lab Conspiracy Theory

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Episode 33: COVID-19 Lab Leak — What Do We Actually Know?

When COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019, two competing explanations immediately appeared: that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans at a wet market, or that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — one of China's premier coronavirus research facilities located in the same city as the outbreak. For much of 2020 and 2021, the lab leak hypothesis was treated by mainstream media and many scientists as a conspiracy theory. By 2023, it had become the assessment of the US Department of Energy, the FBI, and several other intelligence agencies, and the subject of ongoing congressional investigation.

In this episode of The Conspiracy Theory Analyst, we examine the COVID-19 lab leak theory — one of the most consequential and most rapidly evolving conspiracy-to-mainstream stories in recent history — and examine the evidence on both sides with the full picture that the evolving institutional consensus now provides.

We examine the specific evidence for the lab leak hypothesis: the Wuhan Institute of Virology's documented research into bat coronaviruses and gain-of-function techniques, the specific features of SARS-CoV-2's furin cleavage site that some virologists argue are more consistent with laboratory manipulation than natural evolution, the WIV's deletion of its virus database in September 2019 three months before the outbreak was announced, and the documented early illnesses among WIV researchers in the autumn of 2019.

We examine the natural origin evidence: the documented animal trade in Wuhan's markets and the theoretical route by which bat coronaviruses can pass to humans through intermediate hosts, and the genomic similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and bat coronaviruses found in wild populations.

We examine the specific role of Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance in funding coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through US National Institutes of Health grants, and the questions that have been raised about that funding relationship.

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