The Most Complete COVID Origin Report Yet: The Pangolin Papers

Our friend Billy Bostickson (not his real name) has done something extraordinary. In a densely detailed 40,000-word report titled The Pangolin (Coronavirus) Papers, he’s pieced together the full story of COVID-19’s origins. For years, we’ve covered the fragments—Xi Jinping’s bizarre lockdowns and new biosafety laws, genomic anomalies, military ties, missing databases, and the cover-up by U.S. officials—but Bostickson, co-founder of origin-hunting group DRASTIC, has pulled all of it together into one sweeping, forensic narrative.

At the heart of the report is a clear argument: COVID-19 didn’t come from nature—it came from a lab. That’s not new, but Bostickson lays it out with unnerving precision. He walks the reader through how SARS-CoV-2 acquired its most suspicious trait: the furin cleavage site, a genetic insertion that turbocharged the virus’s ability to infect humans—and which has never been found in any related virus in nature. He shows how this feature was likely introduced in lab experiments, involving co-infections and serial passaging of viruses like RaTG13, GX_P2V, and pangolin coronaviruses in human cell lines or animal models.

All of these viruses were present at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—and they were being handled under conditions that would never pass muster in high-containment labs in the West. These types of experiments, better known as gain-of-function, were so dangerous that President Obama imposed a moratorium on them in 2014. That’s when Anthony Fauci began outsourcing the work to Wuhan. Fauci-backed scientists, including the University of North Carolina’s Ralph Baric and EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, deliberately chose Wuhan because of its lax biosafety standards. It was easier and cheaper to get the work done there. Baric even sent the WIV his advanced humanized mice, which mimic human lung tissue and are critical for stabilizing lab-made viruses. They were all playing with fire—and COVID was the result.

The so-called “pangolin theory,” once loudly promoted by the China, the media and Fauci-funded scientists as the virus’s origin story, takes a brutal beating. Bostickson shows the pangolin coronaviruses used as evidence were likely contaminated or outright manipulated. He traces how pangolins were trafficked and dissected in labs—not wet markets—and argues persuasively that their role in the outbreak was fabricated. They weren’t vectors. They were experimental tools.

What emerges is an unsettling picture: SARS-CoV-2 didn’t evolve in nature. It was engineered—pieced together from known viruses, adapted in labs for human infection. From the outset, it transmitted with eerie efficiency. It didn’t need time to evolve in humans—it arrived ready. That doesn’t happen in nature. It happens in labs.

But The Pangolin Papers isn’t just a virology deep-dive. It’s also a story of timing, deception, and systemic cover-up. Bostickson shows the outbreak didn’t begin in December 2019, as official narratives claim. It started earlier. The WIV began scrubbing databases and pulling research offline as early as September. Strange illnesses were reported around Wuhan in October. U.S. officials, like Consul General Russell Westergard, were sounding alarms as his reports would later show.

And then there’s the bombshell: Chinese military scientist Zhou Yusen—of the PLA’s State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity—“filed the first COVID-19 vaccine patent on February 24, 2020, likely starting his work as early as November 2019, before the virus was publicly known.” Months later, he mysteriously fell from the roof of the Wuhan lab and died.

As the virus spread, the Chinese government slammed the door on data access, silenced scientists, and pushed convenient lies—wet markets, pangolins, seafood stalls. They rewrote the timeline. The Huanan market, initially dismissed by Chinese investigators, was repackaged as the epicenter of a natural outbreak. And the global media ran with it.

But what is in many ways most damning in Bostickson’s account isn’t what happened in China. It’s what happened in the United States. Senior officials like Fauci and NIH head Francis Collins worked behind the scenes to steer public attention away from the lab-leak. Private emails revealed that many of the scientists publicly dismissing a lab origin were privately considering it as the most likely explanation.

Bostickson singles out the now-infamous “Proximal Origin” paper as a turning point in the disinformation campaign: a document that claimed, without evidence, that SARS-CoV-2 couldn’t have been engineered, and which was organized and chaperoned by Fauci himself.

And then came DEFUSE.

In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance, together with Baric and the WIV, submitted a proposal to DARPA—the Pentagon’s research arm—asking for funding to insert furin cleavage sites into novel coronaviruses. DARPA decided not to fund the proposal. But someone went ahead anyway. The virus that emerged bore the exact kind of genetic signature described in DEFUSE.

Bostickson also reveals the underreported role of China’s People’s Liberation Army. PLA scientists weren’t just watching—they were working inside the WIV. One virus in particular, GX_P2V, was made lethal to humanized mice in PLA-run experiments. The Chinese military wasn’t on the sidelines. It was actively involved.

Taken together, the evidence paints a devastating picture: a network of Chinese researchers—some civilian, some military—used advanced Western biotechnology to push dangerous experiments past the point of no return. When it all went wrong, they closed ranks. On the U.S. side, those who had funded, enabled, and shared the technology and blueprints—Fauci, along with Baric and Daszak, whom he directly supported—scrambled to suppress the truth.

This isn’t a theory. It’s a documented timeline. Genomics, scientific records, grant applications, internal emails, it’s all there.

The Pangolin Papers is the most complete account yet of how COVID-19 began. It’s detailed, forensic, and unflinching. Indeed, it is more than a reconstruction. It is a warning. This will happen again. And next time, it might not be a virus with a 0.2% fatality rate. Next time, it might be something much worse.

If you’re ready to dig into all the details—the full 40,000-word version awaits. Much of what it contains was already known or reported piecemeal over the years by people like us and a handful of others. What’s different now is that it’s all gathered, documented, and laid out in one place.