Yes, and it would make the lies even worse than they already are.
Revised 19 January 2026. Minor edits 21 January 2026.
The Trump administration has pushed the idea that a spreading virus from somewhere wrought a pandemic.1
That officials have done so without
- addressing serious plot holes in the story,
- proposing a plausible escape route,
- accounting for differences in travel path, or
- explaining why this “thing” failed to show up in any time-series data of any kind prior to emergency decrees
is no surprise, given who made those proclamations in 2020, but is nevertheless disappointing.
By now, Americans are familiar with iterations of the Lab Leak tale and the corresponding false binaries which kept — and still keep — much of the populace from wondering if the government is telling the truth about a spreading pathogen.2
Here I address the ‘novel’ question as to whether SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 technically could have a lab origin — and explore the possibility that “the virus” and “the disease” might have different or distinct origins.
Review
Whatever they really are or represent, SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 are not the same thing.
SARS-CoV-2 (née 2019-nCoV) is the name given to an entity that an international committee of virologists classified as a SARS-related coronavirus, and for which a deeply-flawed PCR protocol was quickly developed and published by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO was loathe to use the name SARS-CoV-2, ostensibly to avoid stoking fear in Asian countries, and prefers to say “the virus responsible for COVID-19” or “the COVID-19 virus.”3
COVID-19 is the name the WHO gave to a “disease” said to be caused by SARS-CoV-2. Why it is stylized in all capital letters but is not a true acronym, like AIDS, MERS, SARS, is unclear.4 Also curious: early “outbreak reports” and Chinese health authorities had characterized the illness as a pneumonia, calling it Wuhan Seafood Market Pneumonia, then Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia). The WHO’s term made no mention of pneumonia.
By the end of January 2020, the agency had assigned COVID-19 a code in the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10), the taxonomy used by member countries for medical billing, cause-of-death attribution, and data collection. Because the ICD is one of the coordinated systems that enables speedy and uniform “responses” to purported disease threats, it’s not surprising that the WHO moved quickly to assign COVID-19 a code.5
More interesting is how COVID-19 was classified, and what that classification made possible. Despite being described as a respiratory illness and initially defined in surveillance systems using basic influenza-like symptoms (fever, sore throat, cough), COVID-19’s primary ICD-10 code (U07.1) was not placed in the respiratory-diseases chapter (the J-codes). Instead, it was assigned to the “Codes for Special Purposes” chapter, under Provisional assignment of new diseases of uncertain etiology or emergency use, alongside SARS and the vaping-associated lung injury designation (EVALI). The code both admitted uncertainty and gave public-health agencies wide discretion, turning COVID-19 into more of an administrative label rather than a settled clinical diagnosis.
U07.1 is also a temporary code. This implies that deaths attributed to U07.1 as the underlying cause will need to be revisited and reclassified at some future point, either under a new COVID-19 code placed elsewhere in the ICD or reassigned to their actual underlying causes.
Notably, SARS-CoV-2 is not named in the U07.1 entry itself. The code simply reads COVID-19, virus identified, with instructions to apply it when a laboratory test “confirms” COVID-19, irrespective of clinical signs or symptoms.6 The vague reference to a “virus” may be intentional, for reasons explained later in this article.
The importance of U07.1 cannot be understated for how it operationalized, and institutionalized, unsubstantiated assumptions.
There has never been any real proof — i.e., mechanistic evidence independent of testing artifacts — that SARS-CoV-2 “spreads” or transmits from person to person. This is more obvious in retrospect, when revisiting the speed, sequence, and nature of events, early episodes, research studies, and analyst insights.7 The WHO initially demurred on the virus being passed between humans. It was only after the agency published the Corman-Drosten protocol, and China claimed transmission had been confirmed through an investigation of a familial cluster, that the agent was said to be “spreading.”
There also has never been any proof that a new, clinically and uniquely distinguishable disease came into existence in late 2019/early 2020. “Covid symptoms” are acknowledged to be identical to those associated with colds and flu and are indistinguishable based on clinical presentation. Evidence that SARS-CoV-2 causes a unique condition called ‘spikeopathy’ is unreliable, and there is no compelling evidence linking things like ‘happy hypoxia’ and ‘dry lung’ to SARS-CoV-2 infection.8 No study has demonstrated that loss or distortion of taste or smell occurred at a higher rate independent of testing practices, reporting bias, or surveillance changes during the so-called COVID era than with other common respiratory illnesses.9
SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: Same Origins?
Revisiting how “the virus” and “the disease” have been referenced and used in 2020 and the years since makes more obvious the differences in the language that individuals, groups, and agencies use when referring to one or both. The same is true of terminology used to characterize a “lab” as the birthplace of SARS-CoV-2 and/or COVID-19.
For instance:
- U.S. media and elected officials used the generic coronavirus or the coronavirus throughout 2020 and until the ‘variants’ offered specific branding (Delta, Omicron).10
- Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, co-authors of Viral, repeatedly say origins of Covid/COVID-19.
- Journalists like Michael Shellenberger say the Covid virus.
- In a widely-misrepresented statement, the CIA said origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, without any reference to a lab, leak, virus, or specific country, and frames possibilities as research-based or natural origin scenarios.
- NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya is now saying lab generated pandemic.
Changes and distinctions in semantic patterns are one reason to wonder whether the entities named SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 are each “something,” yet not directly related and, in fact, have different origins.
‘Lab Origin’ of SARS-CoV-2
Because SARS-CoV-2 appears to be a constructed entity — assembled from something already “out there,” in humans, or otherwise detectable — a digital or computer-based “lab” is the best “origin” contender. Unless it can be convincingly demonstrated that viruses cause illness and transmit between individuals as commonly claimed, the idea of SARS-CoV-2 being manmade and developed in a lab should exclude scenarios involving the agent freely circulating among people or moving untethered through the environment. (Indeed, even virologists assert the virome consists of millions of viruses, with only a relative handful being connected to a disease or illness. The evolutionary explanation for this alleged phenomenon remains elusive.)
If SARS-CoV-2, or the appearance of “it,” can be achieved by dispersing infectious clones via injections, oxygens, swabs, or another direct mechanisms, it’s possible one or more labs could be involved — and those who believe the agent was “released” vindicated. Such methods would not necessarily require that the thing being called SARS-CoV-2 causes illness or is a catalyst for disease.
Another possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 is somehow an effect or consequence of vaccination, which would also lend credence to the ‘lab origin’ or ‘lab-generated’ claim.
‘Lab Origin’ of COVID-19
It’s also easy to imagine COVID-19 coming “from” or being “generated by” lab or research-based activities — if, that is, the term doesn’t mean (or doesn’t only mean) what we’ve been told it means.
While it appears to be an acronym, “COVID-19” is actually a pseudo-acronym — unlike other contemporary disease names such as AIDS, MERS, and SARS, in which each capital letter represents a separate word.
Coronavirus disease 2019 = COVID-19
The idea that COVID-19 has another meaning isn’t new — and is probably a testament to its official meaning being rather bland and vague. It also sounds like a code name for an exercise or clandestine enterprise, not a disease. Certification of Vaccination ID 2019 was a popular candidate on social media, but isn’t a strong contender, in my opinion, because it’s not a disease name and doesn’t apply well to COVID as an operation.
That said, if COVID is a real acronym — in addition to being a fake one — then there are many options for what each letter might stand for. Exploring these options through a kind of conceptual “mix and match,” as illustrated below, is an intriguing mental exercise.
C – Covert, Coordinated/Cooperative, Contagious, Coronavirus, Computer, Condition, Chemical, Cancer
O – Overt, Operation, Observation, Opioid, Organism, Oxygen
V – Virus/Viral, Vaccine, Variant, Vascular, Vector, Ventilator, Versed (Midazolam), Vital, Via
I – Influenza, Induced, Initiated, Infected/Infection/infectious, International Involved, Invasion, Insurrection
D – Danger, Deployment, Disease, Disaster, Death, Disorder, Drill, Disruption
Many combinations are possible but two kinds of possibilities seem most logical, given what we’ve observed and how events have played out over the past six years.
1. COVID as Coordinated Operation
Looking back at the massive, militarized mobilization in early 2020 — and the pretense of a chemical attack or bomb-drop scenario in New York City10 — it’s possible “COVID” initially referred to a 4-8 week period during which many countries were participating in a drill (e.g., Coordinated Overt Viral Invasion Drill), under the auspices of a ‘pandemic response’.
In this way, deaths that occurred (or were shown to have occurred) in the timeframe could be branded “COVID deaths” not because of the nature of the causes, but because of when and under what conditions they occurred. This could extend beyond the initial emergency period to weeks and months when democidal protocols in hospitals, nursing homes, and/or emergency medical services continued.
This idea is aligned with the ‘kill box’ mechanism described by Katherine Watt.11 If Watt is correct that the U.S. Department of Defense and World Health Organization are in the midst of a global, permanent campaign that targets the entire world population, then it’s easy to see how each wave of excess death12 could be carried out by the tools she identifies, i.e., informational control through propaganda and censorship; psychological tactics that promote fear and compliance; and the use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) agents.
In that event, the letters could stand for one more agents or instruments used in the campaign, with COVID being an umbrella term for means employed or blamed — e.g., Coronavirus, Chemical, Opioid, Oxygen, Virus, Vaccine, Ventilator, Versed (Midazolam), Influenza, Infection Deaths.
2. COVID: A new name for an ‘old’ disease?
If SARS-CoV-2 is a pre-existing, endogenous, or confected entity, it could be serving as a “cover” for a non-spreading disease that had already been observed or studied, remained undisclosed, and was not linked to a single pathogen or “virus.”
With this possibility, COVID could stand for ‘Covert Operation for Vaccine-Induced Disease’ or ‘Covert and Overt Viral Infectious Disease’ and refer to a condition resulting from the one-time or cumulative immunosuppressive effects of seasonal shots, which are (of course) developed in labs.13
Watching and listening closely to things that prominent ‘Early Treatment’ figures, ‘COVID centrists,’ and veteran ‘vaccine skeptics’ have said and done lends support to this idea. Numerous examples could be cited; two suffice, for now.
In 2024, as part of a debate, Pierre Kory recorded responses to questions I posed about his early 2020 experiences, in which he seemed to hint at a pre-existing disease, and which characterizes as ‘Long COVID’ and ‘Long Vax.’ Kory said,
“The novelty of this pathogen is, I think, also equally best-evidenced in terms of the huge rates of long COVID, which is – although it’s a new name, it’s an old disease. It’s called MECFS from myalgic encephalitis chronic fatigue syndrome. The three pillars of that diagnosis is fatigue, post-exertion fatigue, and brain fog or cognitive deficits. I literally left Madison and I have a practice which treats nothing but Long COVID and Long Vax. Actually, Long Vax is far more common than Long COVID. But the Long COVIDs, I mean, they’re still equally – or almost equally – the vaccine injured are much sicker, generally on average, sicker than the Long COVIDs. But Long COVIDs are wicked. I mean, I have literally a practice full of them.”
It’s hard to read these statements and not consider whether Pierre Kory and many other medical professionals with certain specialities and backgrounds were recruited into a militarized effort to hide problems with vaccines and help execute a simulation with real people under the cover of a ‘pandemic.’
This wouldn’t require ‘the recruits’ to have full cognizance of being so-used or leveraged, and would fit with the appearance of COVID as an operation involving the Department of Defense and armed forces of many countries.
Suzanne Humphries, co-author of Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History, is a kidney specialist who had noticed that patients with emergency kidney failure had recently received a flu shot. Humphries mentioned this in a Joe Rogan appearance but was more explicit in an April 2014 conversation on David Crowe’s The Infectious Myth podcast.
Responding to Crowe’s question about how she came to be a vaccine critic, Humphries said:
“For me, it was pretty clear and simple. It’s that patients were being rolled into the emergency room with, previously having normal kidney function, and then having full-blown dialysis-dependent kidney failure, and then several of them offered to me the comment to me that they were fine and then they had that flu shot. And this was in 2009 when the two flu shots were given separately.
And so after that I decided to start paying closer attention and adding that into my history – “When was your latest vaccination?” And I found that adding that simple question to my history and physical examination for every new patient led to some rather startling and interesting information, especially doing inpatient consults, where it was very clear what the kidney function was when they entered the hospital, what was done to them as far as drugs and medications and surgeries, and when the vaccine came into play, and when the kidney failure developed. And I saw that there was a correlation. So that’s really what kind of awakened me to start looking farther.”14
Renal failure in “COVID patients” in spring 2020 was also a theme in reports from critical care doctors such as Pierre Kory and Paul Marek, and the focus of ‘wave 1’ studies.15 Other conditions were too, but what makes renal failure interesting from the COVID as Operation and COVID as New Name for Old Disease perspectives is that it is relatively common in patients who are nearing the end of life and suspected to be a consequence of vaccination.16
COVID as a vaccine-instigated condition blamed on a scapegoat sequence named SARS-CoV-2 would not mean the WHO was telling the truth with its announcement of a new disease, or its declaration of pandemic, because the agency’s claim is that “COVID-19’ is caused by a spreading or transmitting novel coronavirus.
COVID being a non-spreading disease that manifests mostly in the elderly and those with co-morbidities, and/or resulting from or correlated with vaccination would support the hypothesis that the COVID event was, in part, a planned, intentional effort to hide and try to “fix”problems with seasonal shots or other medical treatments and experimentation.
Returning to the WHO’s ICD-10 entry COVID-19, virus identified: it is possible that a reason for not naming SARS-CoV-2 explicitly could be that the WHO and other authorities have been aware of ‘the disease’ for years and cannot ‘pin’ it on a single virus. Alternatively, perhaps they need the flexibility to use co-incidental detection of other viral agents as causal of COVID. In other words, they can’t blame COVID on shots, so they blame it on ‘virus identified’ — much like I have said was being done for years, and increasingly so, with influenza in the U.S.17
Another, more speculative possibility: lab leak could be an intelligence-community ‘wink’ at, or allusion to, the concept of a “leaky” vaccine, with ‘Covid came from a lab’ being a double-entendre that secures plausible deniability, though still being entirely at-odds with public perception — and a mass deception.
Summary
So, to answer the headline question, yes, there are ways for SARS-CoV-2 and/or “COVID-19” to have exclusive “lab origins” — and have a biologically-unrelated relationship and beginnings.
The possibilities put forth are not the only options, of course, but would resolve certain tensions around ‘the origins debate’ and provide somewhat more satisfying answers to basic questions that still have not been fully addressed, let alone answered.
Even if the speculation about COVID-19 having hidden meanings is incorrect, the fact that ‘the disease’ is not anything like what public health propaganda claimed it was should be reason enough for anybody to entertain hypotheses that once would have seemed outlandish.
As long as the WHO and officials from member nations continue to avoid explaining exactly how their spreading pathogen got from a lab or cave or market to everywhere else, we should assume they pulled off a socio-political event and proceed with methods employed by social and political scientists (rather than those of the biological or epidemiological variety) to force confessions and expose the truth.
- White House. (2025). “Lab leak: The true origins of Covid-19.” The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19/ ↩︎
- Hockett, J., Engler, J., & Neil, M. (2025, May 28). “False Binaries that ‘Limit the Spectrum of Acceptable Opinion’ in the COVID-19 Debate and Perpetuate Lies Told by The Powers That Be.” Wood House 76. ↩︎
- https://web.archive.org/web/20200220090143/https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it ↩︎
- With AIDS, MERS and SARS-1, the “S” stands for syndrome. ↩︎
- GISAID, the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data, is another. ↩︎
- The United States (CDC) did not adopt U07.2 for use; other countries did. ↩︎
- Hockett, J., & Engler, J. (2025, April 27). “Was there ever any evidence for human-to-human transmission of 2019-nCoV?” Wood House 76. ↩︎
- Neil, M., Engler, J., & Hockett, J. (2023, December 21). “’Spikeopathy’ does not explain the ‘novel’ symptoms associated with COVID-19.” Where Are the Numbers? | Neil, M., Engler, J., & Hockett, J. (2024, January 16). “Our response to Dr Pierre Kory on whether ‘Spikeopathy’ explains the ‘novel’ symptoms associated with COVID-19”. Where Are the Numbers? ↩︎
- Potential explanations beyond normal incidence include: injury from testing swabs, symptom aggrandizement via behavioral/social cues, nocebo effects or psychogenic inducement/enhancement, and undisclosed deliberate non-pathogenic forces ↩︎
- In some countries, like Germany, the shortened corona is the preferred term. | See also
“Endgame: Virus-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named?” section of The SARS-CoV-2 Name Game ↩︎ - Per Watt, kill box is “a military term for establishing a geographic space or three-
dimensional area for a military attack by air and by surface to kill the people who are in it
and then dismantle the kind of framework and move on to the next campaign.” Watt, K. (2023, May 4). “Construction of the kill box: legal history.” Bailiwick News. Archived at https://archive.ph/2zIDJ (originally published at https://bailiwicknews.substack.com/p/construction-of-the-kill-box-legal) ↩︎ - That is, whatever portion is genuine versus fraudulent or distorted. ↩︎
- Two studies supporting this idea are Richards, K. A., Shannon, I., Treanor, J. J., Yang, H., Nayak, J. L., & Sant, A. J. (2019). “Evidence that blunted CD4 T-cell responses underlie deficient protective antibody responses to influenza vaccines in repeatedly vaccinated human subjects.” The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 222(2), 273–277. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiz433 and Sugishita, Y., Nakayama, T., Sugawara, T., & Ohkusa, Y. (2020). “Negative effect on immune response of repeated influenza vaccination and waning effectiveness in interseason for elderly people.” Vaccine, 38(21), 3759–3765. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.03.025 ↩︎ ↩︎
- Humphries continued: “And, ironically, what really got me into researching heavily was
the resistance that I received from the medical administration when I pointed out to
them that it might be a good idea to withhold vaccines in people who are heaving heart
attacks, who are actively septic, who have cancer and on chemotherapy, who have
Guillon-Barre syndrome and are getting plasma…that perhaps were should wait until the
day of discharge instead of day 1 of their admission before giving them a flu shot. And I
was told that vaccines are safe and effective and that they need to be given as quickly
as possible in the hospital because they take weeks to work, and I was told that polio
was eradicated by vaccines, and I was told that smallpox was eradicated by vaccines,
and what was my problem?” ↩︎ - e,g, N. J. Caplin et al., “Acute peritoneal dialysis during the COVID-19 pandemic at Bellevue Hospital in New York City,” Kidney360, vol. 1, no. 12, pp. 1345–1352, 2020, doi: 10.34067/KID.0005192020. ↩︎
- It has also been associated with use of Remdesivir. However, in March and April 2020 (the
initial emergency period) the drug was not in widespread use and raw numbers do not
support claims that it was driver of excess death in hospitals. For example Walsh et al
(2023) reported a relatively low 11% of intubated patients in one New York hospital system
received the drug. A CDC outbreak report for New York says 23% of COVID deaths were
people with chronic kidney disease, suggesting that associations with Remdesivir use and
renal failure during the “first wave” may be overstated. ↩︎ - Hockett, J. (2025, February 18). “Yes, the CDC lies about flu deaths.” Wood House 76. ↩︎
Original title: Is there any possible way for SARS-CoV-2 and/or “COVID-19” to have a “lab origin”?
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