How we lifted the lid on China’s Covid cover-up
Scientists said it was ‘misinformation’, but I and other researchers uncovered extensive evidence of a lab leak.

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The CIA announced last week that it believes a lab leak is the most probable explanation for the origins of Covid-19, more than five years after the pandemic. The lab-leak theory was once dismissed as ‘misinformation’ and even a ‘conspiracy theory’, although I and other amateur investigators began uncovering the evidence for it back in 2020.
In late 2019, I was working on a travel app. One of its features would be seasonal-illness tracking, which we achieved by monitoring Chinese social-media users talking about their symptoms. Discussing the work with a China hand in late November that year, weeks before news of any outbreak was public, I was told that the trend I had been seeing from early October wasn’t seasonal flu – it was SARS. Having lived in Asia during several novel virus outbreaks, I was not concerned. Outbreaks tend to be relatively frequent and contained.
I foolishly brushed off another warning from a contact in early December 2019 that the travel app might be disrupted by a pandemic. When news of the outbreak broke at the end of the year, I wrongly assumed that the media would soon report that it had begun months earlier, and I carried on working. I wiped my devices in preparation for travelling back to China, but the ensuing Covid-19 pandemic had a different plan.
As lockdowns began in spring 2020, I wondered why more information wasn’t surfacing. With time on my hands after shelving the travel app, I started digging. I first investigated the argument that Covid had come from a viral spillover from an animal host. I found a network selling exotic wildlife that claimed a connection to Wuhan, but little else. Faced with seemingly infinite lab-leak-related rabbit holes to go down after that, I focussed on anomaly detection – what looked out of place?
One thing stood out. On 30 December 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology decided to republish a description of its bat-virus database. Several odd changes were made to its description and, crucially, the virus data it referred to were missing. Attempting to download it led to nothing but an empty zip folder. Why would bat-virus scientists working at a bat-virus lab hide bat-virus data during a local bat-virus outbreak?
This line of questioning led me to the key evidence used to date the start of the pandemic. I started by methodically archiving the bat-virus database’s access records page by page. This allowed me to see when the database was launched, who had accessed it (including researchers from as far away as America, Brazil and the UK) and some unusual downtime for a week in August 2019. It was finally taken offline in the early hours of 12 September 2019. It came back online intermittently in December, but there were no records of anyone outside the Wuhan lab accessing it. The fact that the lab took down this database was used in the US Congress to date the incident that started the pandemic. It was also put forward as the first documented evidence of a Chinese government cover-up.
I was fortunate to connect with a fantastic journalist who published these findings in the New York Post. Obsessively monitoring comments on her article online, I came across users on Twitter (now X) who later formed the group known as the Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19 (DRASTIC). Together, we connected our labyrinth of rabbit holes, leading us to peer into a mineshaft in Yunnan, south-west China. This was where the Wuhan lab had found the closest relative to the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2, years earlier.
DRASTIC uncovered documents showing that a SARS-like outbreak in 2012 among men clearing bat guano from that mineshaft triggered expeditions by Wuhan virologists. China’s top SARS experts reviewed the mineshaft patients’ files, which showed similarities to those of Covid-19 patients. The fatal outbreak clearly met the definition of a notifiable event under World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines at the time. However, it was not reported. The incident would have surely faded into obscurity had virologists not later been tinkering with those viruses in labs.
Assuming malpractice at the very least, I looked into what China’s epidemic specialists were up to in 2019. How might a government (perhaps deliberately) not identify a novel virus tearing across China during flu season? The answer was simple – it was obscured with flu data. Digging further, I discovered that a committee of experts made dramatic changes to China’s influenza guidance in November 2019. The previous guidance had encouraged doctors to isolate and identify viruses in symptomatic patients who tested negative for influenza. In contrast, the new 2019 guidance discouraged this, making the detection of Covid-19 less likely. The world only learned of the Wuhan outbreak because doctors acted in the spirit of the older guidance, investigating unexplained cases and sharing their findings.
As DRASTIC grew, we uncovered more details. I found patents related to the Wuhan lab’s bat-breeding programme that suggested it was struggling to maintain adequate safety levels. Matt Ridley and Alina Chan cover DRASTIC’s work in more detail in their excellent book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.
Pivotally, DRASTIC also worked with a whistleblower from DARPA, the US defence research agency, to release a project proposal called Defuse, which was initially submitted to and rejected by DARPA, by labs working together in the US and Wuhan. This was a blueprint on how to create a pandemic-causing virus, very much like SARS-CoV-2, from parts assembled in the American and Wuhan labs.
Meanwhile, established scientific institutions regularly failed to uncover the truth. The WHO’s ‘investigation’ into the pandemic’s origins (which would later be discontinued) was carried out by the Wuhan lab’s own colleagues and didn’t even inquire about the lab’s bats or the missing virus database.
As a result, the lab-leak hypothesis was considered a closed case and branded a baseless ‘conspiracy theory’. It was covered up in the mainstream media and censored online. Social-media platforms regularly suspended DRASTIC accounts, hid messages, blocked links and were a general nuisance. Meanwhile, academics at prestigious institutions like Cambridge University and the Royal Society grouped believing in a laboratory accident with misinformation. The lab-leak theory was characterised as a ‘potential risk to public health’ and institutions lobbied for more intervention to ‘improve resilience against misinformation’.
Many readers will have experienced the stifling effects of this government overreach during the pandemic and since. I kept a low profile due to legitimate fear of reputational damage. A successful state campaign was being run to discredit anyone speaking against the party line. Luckily, DRASTIC avoided legal trouble during the pandemic-era restrictions, but there was a real threat and still is. The same bureaucratic incentives that drove Communist China to censor warnings and arrest whistleblowers exist in the West to ensure adherence to government policy.
Ironically, one of the best assets the world had in uncovering the origins of the pandemic and preventing the next has been government bureaucracy. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have catalogued a treasure trove of Wuhan’s bat-virus work over the years. With that, we could trace the lab’s activities in south-west China, the experiments chopping and changing SARS-related viruses to make them more infectious to humanised cells, the celebrations of those results in papers and the creation of vast data archives.
Too often, the focus is on the individuals who let the outbreak and subsequent cover-up happen. But there should be more focus on the importance of a good knowledge-sharing ecosystem. By providing low-cost or free data processing, the NIH have made scientists reliant on an at least partially transparent system. Keeping China in this system will benefit the world in the long run. We must assume that people will keep on working in China’s caves and mineshafts, if only because many of the Chinese military’s ballistic missiles are stored there. US-aligned governments need to collaborate with Chinese scientists to keep an eye or five on them, and make sure that if anything more dangerous than a warhead comes out of a Chinese mineshaft again, the world knows about it long in advance.
The answer to preventing the next pandemic is not to improve institutional ‘resilience’ to ‘misinformation’, as the establishment would have you believe. The answer is in empowering you, the reader. Intelligence need no longer be the domain of government agencies or elite journalists. The world is interconnected via a series of online rabbit holes waiting to be explored. That infrastructure allowed volunteers to uncover the mineshaft outbreak in 2012 and its connection to Wuhan, changing the narrative and potentially the course of history. Hopefully this discovery will prevent the next pandemic, too.
Charles Small is an open-source intelligence analyst and co-founder of DRASTIC.
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