A retired high-ranking health official revealed a Wuhan scientist secretly working on a Covid vaccine months before the pandemic broke out could have caused the global crisis and then been murdered for it.
Dr Robert Kadlec, who served in the Trump administration as an official in biodefense and epidemic response departments during the Covid-19 pandemic, revealed the coronavirus could have escaped a Wuhan lab at the hands of Chinese military scientist, Zhou Yusen, who was conducting risky research on live animals.
Dr Yusen was believed to be involved in SARS-related coronavirus animal vaccine research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the Summer or Fall of 2019, Kadlec claims in a government report he co-authored.
During his research, Dr Yusen filed a patent in February 2020 for a Covid vaccine that he was suspected of secretly having worked on for months, just three months after the first case of the virus was reported in China – a time far faster than typical vaccine development.
Three months after filing his patent, the scientist mysteriously died when he ‘fell from the roof of the institute.’
Dr Kadlec believes it was during Dr Yusen’s research that the virus escaped from the WIV and sparked a global health emergency.
Dr Robert Kadlec, who co-founded the Covid vaccine development program Operation Warp Speed, feels ‘an obligation’ to share details of his discussions with Dr Fauci about downplaying the lab leak theory
Dr Kadlec believes it was during Dr Yusen’s research that the virus escaped from the WIV and sparked a global health emergency
Dr Kadlec said: ‘It looked like he was censored as a consequence of whatever happened. Our evidence would suggest that something happened while he was doing his work, which we believe was when the virus first emerged.
‘And whether he was held accountable either through some formal proceeding or not, he was certainly dead by July (2020).’
Asked by Sky News if it was possible Dr Yusen was killed for starting the pandemic, Dr Kadlec told the outlet: ‘It’s certainly possible, we considered that as a plausible possibility, however, we had no evidence to make that assessment.’
Dr Kadlec points to Dr Yusen as a possible source of Covid-19 because of the vaccine patent the Chinese scientist filed so early in the pandemic, leading Dr Kadlec to speculate Dr Yusen knew of the virus long before the rest of the world did.
Dr Yusen filed a patent for a Covid-19 vaccine on February 24, 2020, barely a month after China put Wuhan into lockdown because of the outbreak, but US vaccine developers told government investigators it would have been impossible to have generated the data cited in the patent so swiftly.
It would have taken about three months’ work, meaning scientists at the WIV were secretly working on a Covid vaccine at least two months before Beijing told the world about the pandemic.
Dr Kadlec co-founded the Covid vaccine development program Operation Warp Speed, which culminated in the release of highly effective shots that largely prevented severe illness and millions of deaths. But even in the US, it took approximately nine months for a vaccine to become available.
According to a House Republican report, the rush to develop a vaccine may have led to an accidental lab leak, which could have led to the global pandemic.
As part of the lab leak theory on Covid’s origins, which was once seen as xenophobic but is now subscribed to by government agencies like the FBI, Congressional Republicans and researchers including Dr Kadlec, believe there were two lab leaks: One in 2019 during Dr Yusen’s research and one months later that sparked the global outbreak.
According to that report: ‘During the same time period as experts suggest Zhou began vaccine development against a SARS-related coronavirus in late fall 2019, likely at the WIV, Wuhan experienced an increased incidence of influenza-like-illness (ILI).’
Shi Zhengli – dubbed the ‘Bat Lady’ or ‘Bat Woman’ for her work on bat coronaviruses – investigated the possibility Covid could have emerged from her lab back in 2020, according to colleagues. Dr Yusen worked with her
An expert in global biodefense and national security, Dr Kadlec has warned the US has not learned any lessons from Covid, given the continued support for risky research around the world that could fuel another pandemic.
The US has previously indirectly funded risky research through grants awarded to EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), a controversial research group at the center of the Covid lab leak theory, which then sent money to the WIV from about 2014 to 2020.
Dr Kadlec said: ‘The tools of science to do this kind of synthetic biology, this risky research has not been limited to China.
‘It happens in the United States. It’s happening in a lot of places in the world and we could have another one of these (pandemics) if we don’t accept that.’
Dr Kadlec said he also felt the denial of the lab leak theory was a way for Dr Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to divert attention away from the fact his agency had been allocating grant money that went on to fund WIV experiments that may have prompted the pandemic.
He added: ‘That would be a natural reaction of him or anybody, particularly I think, for him saying, what could this do to me and to our institute as a consequence if we were found to have some culpability or some involvement in this?’
Dr Kadlec told SkyNews: ‘I just feel like it is an obligation that I have to say what happened. And I think to factually try to portray this, not to get sympathy or forgiveness, but more to saying factually, here’s what happened. This is what we tried to do.
‘Did it work? No. In fact, the thing you regret is that the downstream effects were things that we could not control.’
He said he has agonized over the part he played with Dr Fauci to downplay the possibility that Covid escaped from a lab.
‘Yes, we had some successes, we had some other non-successes, meaning failures. And part of the reason I’m still committed to trying to… bring this subject up is at least to say, it’s important to know now what happened,’ the doctor said.
Denying the validity of the lab leak theory also casts doubt on the very real possibility of another crisis arising from other high-security biolabs where risky pathogens are studied.
The public denial of the lab leak theory in favor of one that believed Covid jumped from animals to humans led to a general consensus among scientists to blackball all dissenters and label them as conspiracy theorists.
But recently revealed private correspondence between scientists on Dr Fauci’s team, which published the ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’ paper on March 17, 2020, appeared to show their political motivations.
Dr Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist who also co-authored the paper, told colleagues just weeks before publication the idea of a lab leak was ‘not some fringe theory’ and was, in fact, ‘highly likely’ the genesis of the pandemic.
Separately, co-author Dr Andrew Rambaut, a biologist at the University of Edinburgh, feared pinning the blame on China for ‘even accidental release’ of the virus would cause a geopolitical ‘s*** show’, and so he was ‘content with ascribing it to natural process.’
Dr Andersen responded to that message, saying he ‘totally agree[s] that that’s a very reasonable conclusion’, adding: ‘Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.’
