Do the Origins of SARS-CoV-2 Matter?

Not letting the fish off the hook

There’s an emergent orthodoxy about the “origins of COVID” I want to address before the end of 2024. A recent tweet from Neil Oliver is a good example.

He said,

THE ORIGIN OF WHAT THEY CALLED COVID IS A RED HERRING. It doesn’t matter where it came from or event if it existed at all. WHAT MATTERS IS WHAT WAS DONE IN ITS NAME.

Oliver isn’t the only person to make this assertion. The idea that we should simply move on from probing whence an alleged spreading global viral threat and focus instead on the nature of the response to that threat is similar to what Jeffrey Tucker, Jay Bhattacharya, and many participants at the Stanford University ‘Next Pandemic’ symposium have said in the past few months.¹

At the risk of playing the pedant (again), I’ll identify the misconceptions in Mr. Oliver’s tweet and humbly submit how I think the debate can move forward in 2025 for those of us who will remain interested in the events of early 2020.

1. We already know the origin of COVID-19.

COVID is not a virus. It’s the name of a disease and it came from the WHO, not from a lab. In my opinion, the agency lied about there being a new disease in late 2019/early 2020.

COVID-19 Did Not Come From a Lab

Most countries - being WHO members and users of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) - affirmed the WHO’s decree. Investigating the reasons the WHO lied is not chasing a red herring and we could use more people, not fewer, examining this fraudulent claim. (Denis Rancourt’s latest paper makes excellent progress on that front.)

2. It absolutely matters where the thing named SARS-CoV-2 came from - and if it’s a thing or a thing called a virus at all.

The existence, virulence, and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 is the basis of the WHO’s claim an emergency existed. A “response” to the emergency can’t be examined without consideration of what was being responded to - and whether it was in any way legitimate. In the bigger picture, if global viral pandemics aren’t possible, then no response or pandemic planning of any kind if needed and all playbooks can and should be thrown in the garbage immediately.

Robert Kogon

gave a detailed rationale today on why specific points within the origin debate matter — and correctly noted that X suppresses the debate.²

“…the origin debate does matter. Because if it was zoonosis, by definition it had to be just an accident, and hence the "pandemic" could not have been planned. However, if it's manmade, then obviously that is consistent with planning.

The highly amplified origin discussion cleverly obscures this fact by focusing exclusively on lab-LEAK, a laboratory "accident". But, given all the other evidence of premeditation in the "response," what we should be looking at is the possibility of laboratory creation and deliberate release.

Saying, well it was just nothing at all, still let's them off too lightly. Because it allows them to avoid scrutiny.

Drosten's PCR was the key to the pandemic declaration and Drosten had German colleagues IN WUHAN who were part of a partnership with the WIV that involved highly pertinent experimentation on viruses.

If it was a crime and not an "accident", then how on earth does that lead not get investigated? I will tell you how: because it is being covered up, and this sh*tty platform [X] and its insidious algorithm are making sure it stays covered up.

Kogon is right to imply that people are not grasping or making the connection between origin and motive. Framing fibs about the U.S. funding Gain of Function in Wuhan as the big crime is disingenuous and circumvents basic and critical questions about intent, mechanistic plausibility, and timeline.

The Most Basic Questions

Consider the viewpoints of two Great Barrington Declaration authors - Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta:

• Based on his public statements, Bhattacharya seems to believes SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that was created or adulterated in a lab and made it into the wider world by hitching a ride on a lab worker and transmitting from that lab worker to other humans.³ The experiments being conducted were risky, shouldn’t have been funded, and were carried out in less-than-safe conditions. The research wasn’t accidental but the “leak” was.

• Sunetra Gupta rejects the lab leak hypothesis and wet market scenarios and believes SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic emergence event that occurred in China. It’s not an “accident” per se; it’s within the bounds of what nature can and does do periodically.⁴ GoF isn’t inherently dangerous; we need it so that we can develop countermeasures against the pandemic pathogens nature produces.

So Bhattacharya and Gupta believe two very different things about the source of the virus. At least one of them is wrong. Neither has said there was a release or intentional weaponization of an agent that gave the world a pandemic. Part of what Kogon is saying is if there was an intentional release using a plausible mechanism, regardless of whether it caused a pandemic, there are crimes much bigger than those asserted by the House Select Subcommittee report (for example).

A Better Way

I do NOT want to see people regard questions about origins of SARS-CoV-2 as a distraction. I want to see robust debate that accounts for multiple possibilities and marshals relevant evidence.

Although I’ve said there was no pandemic, I have also said there are more than 2-3 possibilities on the issue of what SARS-CoV-2 is, whence it came, etc. The matrix below is a modest attempt to represent how people might view source, mechanism, transmission, and motive. (Feedback welcome - subject to revision. Revised 22 Dec 2024)

Lab Leak/Wet Market is a false and intentionally misleading dichotomy - one I believe was planted by government agents from the outset. But continuing to focus on undermining that dichotomy without spelling out & confronting what else could or could not have occurred - and how - only gets us so far.

Public officials and scientists should have to fully articulate and defend their propositions to the hilt; to date, very few have been compelled to do so.

RED HERRING lets the fish off the hook.

1. Articles I’ve written about some of the remarks at the Stanford conference can be found here under Next Pandemic.

2. Two platforms known for hosting COVID Dissident views have also ‘suppressed’ the debate: https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/question-everything-except-that-thing

3. Bhattacharya [3:05]: “There’s a history of lab leak going back decades. And, especially if you have work being done in relatively unregulated labs, there really is a real danger — because a lab leak isn’t a nefarious thing. It’s just, you know, you’re human, you’re a lab worker, you’re doing pipetting, whatever, you get bored. The mask slips. You get a cut or something and you get sick, you go home, not knowing that you’ve been infected, you spread the disease - that’s what a lab leak is.”

4. But more so in China apparently… 🤔