Five years ago, the truth was almost unpublishable. You couldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. If you tried to, you were an outcast, a kook, maybe even a racist. But it was nevertheless the truth: COVID-19 likely came from a lab leak in Wuhan, and that lab was funded by the United States government.
The small organization that had obtained proof of this, a nonprofit group dedicated to ending taxpayer-funded animal torture called the White Coat Waste Project, went up against the giant to end all giants (the U.S. government) to get this information to the people.
At the time, the Washington Post said its investigation was “nonsense” and “coronavirus misinformation.” Others called it “disinformation” and a “conspiracy theory.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, then head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had a public meltdown when Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) questioned him about it, stating, “You are entirely and completely incorrect … the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research [conducted at] the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
But the thing is, it was all true.
WCW obtained proof of that early on because it was in the business of filing Freedom of Information Act requests and conducting other investigations into this exact kind of funding in these exact kinds of labs. Why? Because gain-of-function research is animal torture, and labs such as the Wuhan Institute are animal labs. Their practices look like ripping bats from the wild, stuffing them in sacks, and shipping them to the lab where they have restraint devices implanted into their skulls, are tormented by electroshock generators, and are denied water for 23 hours a day. And all of this is funded by taxpayers.
It’s gruesome, reckless stuff, and it’s easy to see why members of WCW were working to end it long before the train apparently jumped the tracks and ended up killing humans as well as animals. They didn’t have to go looking for a smoking gun in this case. It fell into their laps.
Since it first broke this story, White Coat Waste has revealed some of the most important pieces of the pandemic’s origin, including the infamous Fauci-EcoHealth emails and the United States Agency for International Development payout to COVID “Patient Zero.” It has exposed how the National Institutes of Health funded 353 more animal labs across 57 foreign countries, including $770,000 that was sent to a Russian lab that de-brained kittens and forced crippled cats to run on treadmills.
And its advocacy has paid off. For the first time in history, U.S. funding was cut for all animal testing in a foreign country (China). The Russian lab with the cat treadmills was also defunded. The shady “nonprofit” organization EcoHealth Alliance that Fauci and friends used as a pass-through organization for risky testing on animals has been barred from receiving U.S. grants. And today, even the CIA agrees with WCW: Taxpayer-funded animal testing likely created COVID, caused a lab leak, and killed 20 million-plus people — and countless critters. The FBI and the Department of Energy agree with the CIA.
So why bring all of this back up? For one, it’s important to remember that the little guy can still win, even when facing real censorship, disinformation campaigns, propaganda, and powerful people with vested interests in covering their own tracks. Secondly, there is still work to be done.
FIVE YEARS AGO: FAUCI DISMISSED LAB LEAK THEORY EVEN AS ADVISERS PRIVATELY DOUBTED
Gain-of-function research is still legal and poses a significant threat to both animal and human lives. And not only is it still legal, but the government is still taking your tax dollars to fund it, oftentimes in foreign labs with little oversight and other times in our own backyard. (WCW recently stopped a grant to fund gain-of-function bat research in Colorado.)
Of all issues, this one shouldn’t be partisan, and the WCW is building a big, beautiful, bipartisan coalition to shut these activities down permanently before the next catastrophe takes place. A lot of people stuck their necks out in 2020 to make sure we knew the truth. Now it’s our turn to do something about it.
Hannah Cox (@HannahDCox) is the president and co-founder of BASEDPolitics and a fellow for the White Coat Waste Project.