Journalist Michael Shellenberger lays out new reports from Germany and the UK showing government officials were informed that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab back in 2020. The evidence is prompting renewed calls for investigations into a potential global coverup. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.
Chapter 1: What are the new claims about Covid-19 origins?
New reports revealed over the last week that credible sources in both Germany and the UK allegedly informed government officials that the COVID virus escaped from the infamous Wuhan lab. The revelations have sparked renewed calls for investigations into who knew what, when, and increased demands for accountability.
In this episode, we speak with journalist and author Michael Schellenberger about the new evidence of a COVID cover-up and the media backlash for its role in pushing false narratives. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, March 22nd, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
Joining us now to discuss the new claims about government cover-ups related to the origins of the COVID virus is independent journalist and author Michael Schellenberger. Hey, Michael, thank you so much for joining us.
Chapter 2: Who is Michael Schellenberger and what does he reveal?
Thanks for having me.
So let's start with what we just found out from the UK related to the origins of the coronavirus. What did we just learn and how does this change the way we think about how the UK in particular handled this situation?
Chapter 3: What new evidence has emerged from the UK?
Sure. I mean, what just got released was a memo sent from the former head of MI6, which is the UK's version of the CIA. And it was sent with a very well-known and respected professor from London School of Economics in early 2020 that essentially debunked this Nature article called Proximal Origin, which claimed to have debunked that the virus came from a lab.
We had done earlier reporting on this way back in 2023, showing that There was higher ups, to use the language of the key authors, Christian Anderson, who had basically changed the direction that they were going in their research.
In fact, that there was a slack channel that was essentially named after the lab leak that then they changed the name to Pangolin, which was imagined at the time to be the intermediary between bats and humans. And so we already knew that this proximal origin paper was manipulated, I would say, and that the people writing it were told by higher-ups to change their findings.
Chapter 4: How does the UK memo challenge previous narratives?
Well, now we have this British memo, again, from the former head of MI6, saying that, a very extraordinary memo, actually, and the language was strong. It says that the Chinese government is engaged in an information and influence operation to deflect responsibility. The memo says, beyond a reasonable doubt, the Wuhan Institute of Virology retro-engineered a bat virus in January 2020.
We surmise that this was done to align with COVID-19 to sustain the natural causation narrative. So, you know, the implications of this conspiracy, I think it's the correct word in this case, are pretty significant because it would suggest that you now have the US, UK, Chinese, and German governments who all knew that the virus escaped from the lab arguably in January, as early as January.
And we had reported that the U.S. intelligence community had known, in fact, the names of the first three people to be infected by the COVID virus, and that didn't come out.
So, I mean, this is significant both because it obviously implicates a number of senior American officials, including Anthony Fauci, but it may have meant that our response to the virus may have been different had we known that it had come from a lab.
And to be clear, you're saying January 2020, there's evidence that they knew all the way back then that this most likely came from the Wuhan lab.
Yeah, and not only that, but that it was multiple agencies that knew that in the United States and then multiple intelligence agencies around the world.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the German intelligence reports?
I mean, it's worth noting that just less than a week ago and just a few days before the British announcement, two major newspapers in Germany revealed that the German Foreign Intelligence Service, their version of the CIA, had also believed that there was a 80 to 90% chance that the coronavirus had leaked from a Chinese lab.
So we don't know if that was all relying on the same intel or if it was different intel, but you certainly had many intelligence agencies in different countries all concluding the same thing.
Right, so credible sources of their own government agencies that are then suppressed by those governments in order to pursue this other narrative that protects not just China, but entities like the NIH here in the U.S., I wanted to highlight that the journal Nature was the one behind the Proximal Origin paper.
They've just released another study last month claiming there's, quote, mounting evidence that points to raccoon dogs as the most likely source of COVID-19. So they're doubling down on this. Is it too strong to say that this is a disgraced journal at this point that's lost credibility?
Yeah, oh, 100%. Nature's been behaving badly in a number of areas, basically showing that they have a political agenda that they put before science. But I mean, the entire scientific establishment is implicated by this. You know, the most important figure in it all is Anthony Fauci.
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Chapter 6: How has the journal Nature's credibility been affected?
You know, there's a video of him in 2020 saying, when I heard that this coronavirus had come from Wuhan, the first thing I thought was wet market. Well, I just... I mean, that's like absurd. He's the one that basically skirted the U.S. ban on coronavirus gain-of-function research, moved it to China, and moved it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
So I'm sure that when he heard that there was a coronavirus here from Wuhan, his thought was not wet market. It was Wuhan Institute of Virology. And, oh, God, I can't believe that this happened. And, you know, you sort of see it, and he just looks...
You just kind of look at it now, obviously, in context, and it just appears to be this is one of the most significant cover-ups of the last 100, 200 years. I mean, it's hard to find a bigger one.
Yeah, and like you've highlighted here, increasing evidence and consensus that the origin was in fact what everyone assumed that was using common sense at the beginning, the Wuhan lab, which makes the most sense. I want to talk about the media response to this. So we talked about nature a little bit, but the New York Times has gotten a lot of blowback in the last few days.
They just published an opinion piece saying we were misled about the origin of the virus. And a lot of people are slamming the New York Times saying you had a great deal of responsibility in how you covered this. How have you seen the media responding to new evidence and trying to redirect or correct course in the intervening months?
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Chapter 7: What role did Anthony Fauci play in the Covid-19 controversy?
Well, I think people are correctly angry because the person that wrote it is somebody who essentially got the CDC to reverse its position on masks. Now, we don't think that mask mandates had any effect. And of course, we think that they actually had a pretty significant negative effect, particularly on children. Obviously, it led to a whole set of culture wars. It became a kind of symbol.
This is Zeynep Tufekci, who wrote this article. And so I I think, you know, the grammar in particular, which was we were badly misled, rubbed people the wrong way since people think that it was the New York Times who badly misled people.
I mean, I observed something else, which I think is just as important, which is that the last several weeks we've had the media just raising the alarm that Trump is going to cut funding for medical research.
There's actually a dispute about that because the real issue is that they're demanding that the National Institutes of Health reduce the so-called indirect costs, which are supposedly overhead, to just 15 percent of the project rather than, you know, in some cases it's 50 percent or more, which is just clearly overcharging. Well, here you have a very concrete situation where you have U.S.,
taxpayer funded medical research that, according to The New York Times now and everybody else, appears to have led to the coronavirus pandemic and then turning around and like literally in the same breath talking about how outrageous it is that Elon Musk would be auditing the agencies or that the Trump administration would be investigating whether the medical research is being well spent.
In fact, Zeynep Tufekci criticized Elon just last month for how dare he be involved in this audit and there must be something nefarious. I mean, there's just a lack of self-awareness on the part of the media elites here that is pretty typical of their behavior. I mean... This is a situation where we need significantly more public and white executive branch oversight of our medical institutions.
So for them to just turn around and pretend like none of this happened on COVID is particularly galling.
Now, you mentioned Fauci. Trump has just made the statements declaring that Biden's preemptive pardons for Anthony Fauci and others are invalid. His argument is that all of these pardons were signed by an auto pin, and thus Biden did not actively sign them and allegedly was not even fully aware what was being enacted in his name.
Trump's going to try to make that case we'll see if that holds up but related to this topic a lot of people are looking for some sort of accountability particularly from Fauci what do you see coming on that front what investigations are ongoing with congressional members where can we look for potential accountability?
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