They all lied to us about COVID

China lied. Fauci and the medical establishment lied. The media lied.

But why? As it turns out, they all had their reasons.

Five years after COVID killed millions — including my father — it’s clear that scientists gambled on risky research, and we all lost. Honest scientists now admit that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab, something also concluded by the FBI, DOE, and the CIA.

It took most people five minutes to guess what happened. Ground zero of COVID was literally in the very neighborhood where a highly dangerous lab specialized in making that deadly disease even deadlier.

The media and our medical establishment assured us that anyone stating the obvious was a crazy conspiracy theorist. Instead, scientists pushed their own theory that an infected bat – from a thousand miles away – worked its way into a food market near the lab. In hindsight, it’s shocking that so many people bought into that story.

Now, the larger question isn’t just how it escaped. It’s why so many powerful groups fought tooth and nail to keep us from knowing the truth.

Let’s start with China. Their lies are the easiest to understand: authoritarian regimes live or die by controlling information. And the information they allow out always makes them look good.

Even before COVID, warnings about Wuhan's lab safety surfaced. U.S. State Department officials visited the Wuhan lab in 2018 and sent alarming cables back to Washington, highlighting inadequate safety protocols and under-trained staff. They explicitly warned of a SARS-like pandemic risk.

In late 2019, suspicious activity intensified. Wuhan's lab mysteriously removed its entire virus database without explanation. Satellite images showed increased hospital traffic near the lab. U.S. intelligence later confirmed that three Wuhan researchers fell seriously ill with COVID-like symptoms weeks before China's first officially reported case.

The Chinese Communist Party swung into action. Beyond deleting its entire coronavirus database, over 22,000 samples, it also silenced doctors like Li Wenliang, who first warned colleagues about a SARS-like illness. China forced him to lie about "spreading rumors," and he later died from COVID himself.

The regime also made citizen journalists vanish. Chen Qiushi disappeared after reporting from Wuhan’s hospitals; Fang Bin went missing after posting videos of body bags stacked in hospital hallways. Over 450 Chinese internet users were arrested for sharing inconvenient truths. Officially, China claims around 83,000 COVID deaths; the CDC estimates the real number at 1.4 million.

That's brutal but predictable because China lies continuously. Far more troubling was the response here at home — especially from our scientific establishment and the media.

Anthony Fauci wasn’t honest with the public from the start. On January 31, 2020, Fauci received an email from virologist Kristian Andersen, who warned the virus had "unusual features" that looked "engineered."

Fauci’s response? He quickly organized a confidential meeting with NIH director Francis Collins and other top scientists. Within days, the same scientists who privately expressed doubts drafted the now-infamous "Proximal Origin" paper, published in Nature Medicine, declaring a lab leak "not plausible" and branding alternative theories as conspiracies.

Internally, some authors were saying something quite different, like: “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” The scientists all fell in line, protecting their research grants and fearing career-ending repercussions from the NIH.

For years, such research was banned by the U.S., yet the medical establishment found a way around that by funding such experiments at Wuhan via the private EcoHealth Alliance, led by Peter Daszak. The Wuhan Institute, under NIH grants, conducted these risky "gain-of-function" experiments — creating viruses more infectious to humans — in facilities rated far below recommended safety levels.

When a few journalists and researchers uncovered the dangers, and a Congressional investigation exposed more, the Biden administration eventually enacted a temporary ban on EcoHealth receiving federal grants. Even then, 77 Nobel laureates rose to its defense.

Fauci and top scientists had every reason to worry, since publicly acknowledging a lab origin would devastate their institutions and careers. They were corrupted.

But why did the media also lie?

Two words: Donald Trump. When President Trump publicly stated he'd seen evidence COVID came from a Wuhan lab, major outlets rushed to discredit the lab leak theory, not because of scientific evidence, but because Trump said it could be true. Politics poisoned their coverage.

What should have been a scientific investigation turned into a political football overnight. Headlines from mainstream outlets explicitly labeled the lab leak theory "debunked" or "discredited" without any investigation at all. And since Trump called it the “Wuhan Virus”, they got to cry “racist” as well.

The Washington Post called it a "conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." The New York Times described it as "a theory that scientists have dismissed." CNN labeled it "a fringe theory with no evidence."

Social media companies joined in, ramping up censorship big time, first voluntarily, then later, during the Biden administration, because of government pressure. Facebook banned posts suggesting the virus came from a lab, as part of their removal of 18 million COVID posts. Twitter made posts and entire accounts disappear, just like the Chinese. YouTube hid videos mentioning it.

But the truth gradually emerged. Former CDC Director Robert Redfield publicly stated he believed COVID likely leaked from a lab. Later, the FBI, the Department of Energy, and the CIA reached similar conclusions. Congress, forced by Senator Josh Hawley's COVID Origins Act, declassified intelligence confirming Wuhan’s research activities and U.S. funding ties. Even the WHO reversed course, now calling for renewed investigations.

This politically driven blindness had devastating consequences: tens of millions dead globally, trillions in economic damage, and shattered trust in institutions we rely on. Yet none of them have faced any real consequences because of it.

China successfully avoided world blame. Our own media has moved on to new scandals. The scientific establishment hasn’t reformed. Dr. Fauci has a presidential pardon, and you can still buy “Saint Anthony” prayer candles on Amazon.

The cover-up's lesson is clear: our institutions failed when we needed them most. And there’s no reason to believe it can’t happen again. That's the real tragedy of the great COVID cover-up.

– Ken

P.S. I took an in-depth look here, if you want to learn even more. It’ll make you angry.