On Jan. 17, 2020, I got an email from Francis Boyle, a professor of law at the University of Illinois. Among Boyle’s accomplishments was that he wrote the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention called the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.

Boyle forwarded a story from NBC about a new disease spreading in China: “Outbreak of never-before-seen respiratory virus prompts CDC to screen passengers from Chinese city at 3 US airports.”

Boyle wrote just one line:

So the question I have: Is there a Chinese BSL4 Facility near Wuhan from which this might have leaked?

I didn’t bother trying to find the answer to Boyle’s question. Neither apparently did the 25 or so people who had done some work on biowarfare issues he also sent the email to. This was just before the Iowa caucuses and I was under pressure to focus on the election. One person responded, saying that he thought lab origin was unlikely and that poor hygiene has generally resulted in more mutations. Boyle responded with a “Thanks.”

A week later, on Jan. 24, 2020, Boyle sent another email: Indeed there was a BSL4 in Wuhan:

Boyle began doing interviews charging that the lab was the source of the outbreak that day. The first was with “Geopolitics & Empire” and would be released on Jan 30, 2020. That interview would be published by GreatGameIndia.

That second email from Boyle carried the headline of a piece he was forwarding from Live Science: “Only one lab in China can safely handle the new coronavirus” which apparently is how he confirmed the existence of the lab in Wuhan. But the piece treated the location of the lab as a coincidence: “The lab happens to sit in the center of Wuhan, the city where the newly identified coronavirus first appeared.” (The date on the piece now is “last updated May 05, 2020” — but it clearly existed on Jan. 24.)

The Live Science piece referenced the Hindustan Times from Jan. 22 which painted the lab as the solution: “A high-security lab in ground zero Wuhan could hold key to cure Coronavirus.”

On Jan. 24, 2020, the same day as his email, Dr. Meryl Nass, one of the people on his list, responded to Boyle, warning that the new disease might not be so lethal:

Sometimes vaccines have made people and animals more susceptible to the disease they were intended to prevent.
They always need to be tested for safety and efficacy before mass use.

Right now we really don't know how deadly this virus is. Remember 2009. At first that flu was thought to be highly deadly but by the following year it was less severe than the average year’s influenza.

Cranking up the fear level, then unleashing untested vaccines on the population is a recipe for disaster. Particularly when the makers of pandemic vaccines have been given total freedom from liability.

Meryl

Citing a former Israeli analyst, Dany Shoham, and a Radio Free Asia report, the Washington Times picked up the story on Jan. 24. Many “progressives” in “independent media” would of course dismiss the whole story based on their limited, skewed knowledge of the “pedigree” of the story; which is a highly dubious approach toward an empirical question. Shoham had written the paper “China’s Biological Warfare Programme” in 2015 [PDF] which of course made mention of the labs in Wuhan.

Meanwhile, according to a timeline by US Right to Know, which has been doing FOIAs to determine the actions of insiders, who of course were aware of the possible connection and told the public nothing when not disinforming:

January 27, 2020: Fauci learned he funds the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
January 29, 2020: [Kristian] Andersen [of Scripps Research] discovered a paper describing gain-of-function techniques with coronaviruses involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Farrar asks to speak with Fauci.

On Jan. 30, 2020, the Washington Examiner would report: “Tom Cotton says coronavirus may have originated in Wuhan 'super laboratory’.”

But Boyle was not the first to publicly charge the lab was the source. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, and I don’t think Boyle was either, but the Daily Mail on Jan. 23, 2020, just a day before, ran a story headlined “China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan — and US biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could 'escape' the facility that's become key in fighting the outbreak.” And there were some making the connection on Twitter just around that time.

Will Jones of the Brownstone Institute recently claimed: “The first known mention of the idea that the coronavirus may have originated in a Chinese lab appeared on January 9, 2020 in a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA).” And Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post has in “Timeline: How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible” bizarrely credited a tweet that was just rank speculation and didn’t actually mention the existence of any labs in Wuhan:

In fact, Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted in understated manner on Dec. 30, 2019: “7 SARS cases reportedly confirmed in Wuhan, where China built its first BSL-4 lab.”

Boyle would end up being attacked, including by the AP in 2021 as one of the “Superspreaders behind top COVID-19 conspiracy theories” — others targeted included GreatGameIndia and the eminent scientist Luc Montagnier who would eventually adopt a stance remarkably similar to Boyle’s before his death in 2022. The hit piece was written by the AP’s David Klepper (“Associated Press newsman covering misinformation, disinformation and extremism”) Farnoush Amiri (now a congressional reporter) and Beatrice Dupuy (“News verification journalist”).

Nass would have her medical license suspended, which she is fighting. In spite of Elon Musk’s claims to uphold Freedom of Speech — but not Freedom of Reach her Twitter account remains suspended as well. She now writes on Substack.

Both she and Boyle have both been scrutinizing the WHO treaty — which they charge is a massive power grab threatening totalitarianism using fighting viruses as a pretext.

husseini

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