The Lie That Locked Down the World

Germany, alongside Fauci, concealed evidence that Covid came from a lab—ensuring the world pursued disastrous policies that made the pandemic far worse.

On March 12, 2025, it was revealed that Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, had early information—known with a high degree of certainty—that Covid originated in a lab in Wuhan, and the German government deliberately buried it. While it has been clear since at least September 2021—when the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s 2018 blueprint for creating Covid-like viruses was leaked—that the virus came from a lab, this new revelation is significant for what it reveals about responsibility for the aftermath. The fact that German authorities had confidential information in 2020 strongly pointing to a lab origin isn’t just an academic detail for historians. The virus’s true origin had enormous implications for how the pandemic unfolded, and the cover-up profoundly shaped the course of events, with devastating consequences.

Had the truth not been concealed—had it been revealed that Covid was engineered for maximum infectivity in humans—the public health response would have unfolded very differently. Natural viruses don’t spread like wildfire overnight; they require time to adapt and become more contagious.

The original SARS virus, for instance, killed 774 people worldwide and infected only about 8,000 in total. In the United States, there were no local transmissions at all. As a natural virus, SARS struggled to spread because it lacked the precision needed to efficiently infect human cells.

This can be likened to a key that doesn’t quite fit a lock. With enough luck, wiggling, and forcing, the wrong key might eventually open the lock—but it’s difficult and unreliable. That’s what happened with SARS.

Covid, on the other hand, was like a key perfectly cut for the lock. From the moment it appeared, it was primed to infect human airway cells with remarkable efficiency. That doesn’t happen in nature. The Covid virus had been designed to infect humans from the start—and the authorities knew it. They lied.

Had the public known the truth, the pandemic would have likely unfolded in a drastically different way. There would have been no futile lockdowns, contact tracing, or social distancing—measures that were senseless against a virus designed to spread rapidly. In fact, had it been revealed that the virus was built to infect everyone, resources would have been focused on protecting the elderly while allowing healthy individuals to live normally, sparing us the farce of endless and extremely costly Covid theatrics.

The consequences of this deception are staggering. The past five years would have looked entirely different. No mass psychosis, no mass unemployment, no mass school closures, no mass cancellations of vital medical care and screenings, no Biden presidency. The ripple effects go on and on.

By concealing the virus's engineered nature, German authorities—led by Chancellor Angela Merkel—set the stage for catastrophic overreactions that tore societies apart. But Merkel wasn’t alone. Anthony Fauci knew by late January 2020 that the virus most likely came from a lab. Yet, like the German government, Fauci chose to suppress this crucial information. Instead, he orchestrated one of the most destructive cover-ups in modern history.

Emails obtained in 2021 through Freedom of Information requests revealed that after learning the virus was likely engineered—and knowing of his own connection to the Wuhan lab, where his funding had bypassed a U.S. gain-of-function research ban—Fauci went into full crisis mode. He turned to a group of handpicked scientists, all reliant on his funding, to manufacture a false narrative. Those scientists, whom Fauci would later reward with grants worth tens of millions of dollars, were tasked with crafting a fake paper designed “to disprove any type of lab leak theory.”

That paper, titled Proximal Origin, was quickly deployed to reinforce the false claim that Covid had a natural origin. We were among the first to report on the details of its deception and were the first to label it the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper. In April 2020, Fauci stood beside President Trump at the White House podium and directly contradicted Trump by claiming with absolute certainty that Covid had emerged from nature. He cited the fraudulent paper without disclosing that he had secretly commissioned it. Incredibly, Fauci even pretended not to know the authors.

Fauci didn’t just downplay the lab leak theory—he orchestrated a full-scale cover-up to push the lie that Covid was natural, knowing full well it wasn’t. That lie changed everything. The fact that the German government, whose advisor Christian Drosten was involved in Fauci’s initial cover-up, was complicit only makes it worse.

By early February 2020, the virus was burning its way through populations across the globe. While nothing could have stopped the virus from spreading, Fauci's cover-up ensured that leaders were chasing the wrong strategy. Because the virus was falsely framed as a natural SARS-like virus, public health officials believed it could be contained with mitigation tactics like lockdowns, contact tracing and social distancing. None of those measures had any chance of stopping a virus that had been engineered to spread aggressively among humans.

The deception was particularly damaging because Fauci knew the virus had a highly unusual feature called a furin cleavage site—a key marker that made Covid especially infectious. The presence of this site in the Covid virus was so anomalous that it had never been seen before in any natural SARS-like virus—and still hasn’t. One of Fauci's handpicked scientists privately told him, "I just can't figure out how this gets accomplished in nature... of course in a lab it would be easy."

Fauci knew the implications. The furin cleavage site made Covid vastly more contagious than natural SARS. Yet Fauci deliberately concealed that fact, ensuring that public health authorities believed they were fighting a virus that could be suppressed with containment measures. This was a fatal deception.

Strikingly, the German, Fauci’s, and the Chinese concealment efforts were closely aligned. In early February 2020, Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, published a paper describing the new virus but curiously omitted any mention of the furin cleavage site—the virus’s most distinctive and alarming feature.

Contact tracing, which Fauci relentlessly pushed, proved to be a particularly staggering waste of resources. Contact tracing works for viruses that are difficult to transmit, but it is utterly useless for a fast-spreading, airborne virus like Covid—especially one designed to spread efficiently among humans. The same applies to surface disinfection campaigns, obsessive hand hygiene rituals, and other futile measures that dominated public life for years. None of it could have stopped a virus that had been pre-adapted for human transmission.

Instead, had the truth been known, governments could have focused on protecting the vulnerable. Early treatment options could have been pursued more aggressively. Schools could have stayed open, businesses could have kept running, and critical medical screenings could have continued. Society could have adapted rationally rather than succumbing to destructive fear and hysteria.

The Great Barrington Declaration, authored by the incoming director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, alongside Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, outlined a far more sensible strategy: focus on protecting the elderly while allowing the rest of society to continue living normally. Had Fauci been honest about the virus’s true nature, this approach would likely have been embraced as the obvious path forward. Instead, Fauci worked behind the scenes to discredit and undermine these scientists, ensuring their sound strategy was ignored. Fauci’s boss at the time, Francis Collins went so far as to demand a “devastating takedown” of Bhattacharya, now his soon-to-be successor.

The consequences of the cover-up reached far beyond public health policy. It shielded China from accountability for the outbreak and allowed key figures behind the dangerous Wuhan research to escape scrutiny. While Fauci’s role in the cover-up is directly tied to his involvement in outsourcing banned gain-of-function experiments to the Wuhan lab, Germany’s role appears more closely linked to its deep economic and institutional ties to China, particularly under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The cover-up also entrenched harmful narratives that empowered authoritarian governments to impose unprecedented levels of social control, surveillance, and censorship—all under the guise of public health.

In the end, the Covid response was shaped by a lie. The tragedy wasn’t just that the virus leaked from a lab; the greater crime was the deliberate deception that followed. Merkel, Fauci, and their allies knew the truth yet chose to bury it, unleashing a wave of destructive policies that devastated economies, shattered lives, and fractured societies.

Creating the virus and allowing it to escape was a horrific crime. But concealing the truth—fully aware that this lie would dictate global policy and inflict immeasurable harm—was far worse.