Covid Origin Bombshells

Originally published on May 10, 2023

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in May 2023. We are republishing it because one of the emails discussed in the article—an email from NIH Director Francis Collins that strongly implies that Collins personally lied about the origin of Covid—has recently gone viral on social media. This resurgence in interest appears to stem from the fact that most people had never seen or heard of the email before. It is easy to overlook how much incriminating information regarding the origins of Covid has not reached the broader public due to the ongoing press embargo on the topic.

FOIA Bombshells

By Hans Mahncke and Jeff Carlson

Originally published on May 10, 2023

Two new and explosive stashes of Covid origin documents were released last week–one involving Fauci’s organization, the National Institutes of Health–and the other involving the State Department, which was run by Mike Pompeo at the time. 

The new documents aren’t not so much pieces of the puzzle as they are huge smoking guns all on their own. 

One of the NIH emails proves that there was collusion at the highest levels to cover up the origin of the pandemic. Meanwhile, officials at the State Department were expressing concerns at the onset of the pandemic, stating that if their warnings regarding the Wuhan lab had been taken seriously, the pandemic could have been avoided entirely.

Yet no one, including Pompeo, said anything, and we had to wait for three years for these documents to be pried out of the hands of deep state bureaucrats.

NIH Email

A new batch of NIH documents was obtained by independent journalist Jimmy Tobias last week. Most of these documents had been released under previous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits but NIH sensors covered up all the incriminating parts. Tobias successfully sued to have those parts unredacted. 

While the originally released email from NIH head Francis Collins was entirely redacted, the newly unredacted email proves that the situation surrounding EcoHealth Alliance–which was the conduit through which Collins and Anthony Fauci were funding gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology–was causing a far bigger headache for the two men than they publicly let on. 

Publicly, they pretended to know nothing about the Wuhan lab, but privately they knew a lot. As the most stunning of the new emails (Figure 1) shows, Collins was upset that his predecessor as director of the National Institutes of Health, Harold Varmus, had started talking to the media about the origin of Covid. Varmus had not said anything incriminating, but Collins needed to put a stop to it regardless, in case he did. 

Figure 1 (credit: James Tobias)

In the August 19, 2020 email to Varmus, Collins admitted that the EcoHealth grant and its connection to Wuhan was presenting one of the most difficult and wrenching situations in his 11 years as NIH Director. Collins added that this topic was not appropriate for email and the “there’s a lot more to this story than we have been able to talk about.”

Collins also told Varmus that Fauci and Collins himself would like the chance to speak with Varmus about their private insights into what had happened at the Wuhan lab and why it was the worst thing that Collins had encountered in his eleven years as director. 

To be clear, this is incontrovertible proof of a conspiracy. It is real, tangible, and documentary evidence that Collins and Fauci were conspiring together to cover up the lab leak. Specifically, they needed to rope in Varmus, who had just started talking to the media, about what he could and could not say about Covid origins. 

These revelations are so stunning that they can only lead to one conclusion: The previous version of this email wasn’t redacted for any legitimate reasons but because Collins didn’t want a paper trail of his lies and deceptions about the origin of Covid. We know from earlier FOIA emails that Collins personally vetted FOIA requests before anything was released (Figure 2).

Figure 2

At the time of Collins’ email, Varmus was a supporter of the natural origin narrative for Covid but Collins and Fauci must have concluded that having the former director of the NIH talking freely was not a risk they could take, at least not without filling him in on what they knew and what could be said publicly.

Perhaps most tellingly, Collins shared a link to one of the first scientific articles to systematically lay out the case for a lab origin of Covid. This is remarkable for various reasons:

First there’s the fact that Collins shared it at all.

Second, Collins said he was sharing the article not because he “completely” agreed with it. The interference is that he agreed with at least parts of it. Just as a reminder of how significant this is, we are talking about a scientific article that was one of the first to show that Covid almost certainly came out of a Wuhan lab. 

Third, there’s also the fact that at the same time that Collins was sharing scientific evidence for a lab leak with his predecessor, he was telling the public that the virus was 100% natural and that anyone who said otherwise was a conspiracy theorist. In fact, he was actively trying to censor lab leak proponents.

It turns out that the purported conspiracy theory was true all along and that Collins knew that it was true.

State Department Emails

The second new document release comes from the State Department via transparency group U.S. Right To Know. It is as stunning, perhaps even more stunning, than the Collins email. 

In one of the new emails, which are from March 2020, an unnamed State Department official forwarded warnings about the Wuhan Institute of Virology to another unnamed State Department official. Those warnings had been originally sent by way of cable by the State Department to the National Security Council in 2018. They were extremely explosive, warning among other things that the Wuhan lab had a: 

"serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory."

The 2018 cables also warned that the Wuhan lab’s director, Shi Zhengli, wanted to conduct her coronavirus experiments in high containment biosafety level 4 labs but her request was allegedly denied by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, a state agency of the Chinese Communist Party (Figure 3).

Figure 3

The cables also warned that Shi Zhengli had developed viruses that could infect humans. In sum, all the big red warning flags that were needed were there. But, apparently, no one listened. 

In response to the March 10, 2020 email sharing the prescient warnings from 2018, an unnamed State Department official replied: 

"The prescience in that cable is amazing/scary"

Another unnamed official sent a simple three word reply:

“wow…just wow”

Yet another reply from an unnamed state department official stated:

“Geez, I shall call you Cassandra from now on.”

Cassandra is a reference to the character out of Greek mythology who kept making accurate prophecies but no one believed her. For instance, she warned about Greek enemies hiding inside the Trojan Horse but she was not believed and the enemies got into Troy. 

But if all of that wasn’t bad enough, there is another bombshell: 

According to one of the emails in the new State Department email batch, an official whose name is redacted emailed another unnamed official to say: 

“Too bad I couldn’t get anyone to listen even with front channel cables and letters from the Ambassador to the NSC [National Security Council].”

The Ambassador was Terry Branstad, the former governor of Iowa who was appointed by president Trump as Ambassador to China. In other words, aside from the cables themselves, Branstad had sent a letter about the Wuhan lab warnings to Trump’s Homeland Security advisor Tom Bossert. But again, nothing was done about it.

What is perhaps equally shocking is that while these discussions were taking place internally within the State Department in early March 2020, the department was led by Mike Pompeo, a supposed purported ally of Trump.

Imagine the impact it could have had on the pandemic response and on Trump's political fortunes if this crucial information about the pandemic's origin had been made public in March 2020 instead of May 2023.