COVID-19: Mystery Solved: It leaked from a Wuhan lab but it's not Chinese junk Paperback – October 31, 2024

This book is an in depth history of the development and escape of the covid-19 virus. It reads like an historical account and is hard to put down. The author has done extensive investigation into the reasons, the players and the process by which this pathogen was developed in a lab, shipped around the world and leaked, to cause what we know to be the Covid-19 Pandemic. You may be shocked to discover why the virus was developed and how it has been covered up by governments around the world. It is inevitable that unless people rise up and expel the bureaucrats and scientists who allow this kind of debacle to occur, it will happen again. Sadly, I'm not seeing much progress in that direction.

This book is a manuscript waiting for a sophisticated non fiction editor to whip it into shape. It's a mess of a (first draft ) of book. The author uses terms without explanation and references grants proposals with out citations, which is the central flaw of the book. He makes claims stated as fact without citation. He uses quotes without citations and says at the end " There are way too many references used in the writing of this book to list all of them." Sorry but that just doesn't cut it for a non fiction book making an argument about a subject as controversial as COVID origins. I know it's self published, but, no, I should not have to go to your Substack to see the citations. I know editors are expensive but perhaps AI could have assisted the author in the grunt work. An editor could have helped with overall organization of the writing which I found confusing and meandering. Overall the writing is pedestrian but that's the least of the books problems.

The author makes a strong case that COVID emerged from a Wuhan lab leak of a live attenuated vaccine engineered by the esteemed coronavirus engineer Ralph Baric, developed as an airborne transmissible agent through wildlife passage at NIH's Rocky Mountain Lab BSL4, and sent to the Wuhan BSL4 for testing. That may sound convoluted, but it's plausible and maybe even just what you'd expect if you follow the research program laid out in their papers and grant applications just prior to the pandemic.Thanks to FOIA and insider disclosures, we now know that the U.S. government was spending heavily to find ways to inoculate bats against coronaviruses in order to reduce the risk of spillover to humans. What this book helped clarify for me is how these research programs were interconnected, and how they could have resulted in a lab leak; specifically, which experiments had succeeded or failed in 2018, and what were the next steps? Understanding who had the requisite capabilities and intent to develop and test these animal vaccines is the key to interpreting the reams of indirect evidence, and it also helps decipher the subtle finger-pointing in BSL-world (e.g., why Shi Zhengli published RaTG13 and said "not my lab"; why Ralph Baric loudly said his lab never sent chimeric virus to China). It has been five years, and we still don't have much FOIA from the various BSL4 experiments, but this book nevertheless succeeds in connecting the dots: DARPA PREEMPT, Project DEFUSE, NIAID CREID, Linfa Wang, Vincent Munster, Egyptian fruit bats, and an ongoing campaign of misdirection by elite scientists and governments.Five stars for doing better work than the U.S. intelligence community, minus 1 star because the author sometimes fails to clearly distinguish between fact, inference, and hypothesis. It may turn out that some of the author's inferences (e.g., the bioengineering details) were incorrect, but the broader argument is well supported, and it has a lot of explanatory power. Overall this book is highly informative, and not junk.