A Dazzling Tower of Inference: A Review of Muddy Waters
Wendy Orent on the recent COVID lab leak book from Robert Kadlec.
By Wendy Orent Published 2/19/26
The massive document called Muddy Waters, published by the Scowcroft Institute of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A & M University, released in several installments over a period of months, is perilously well-named.
This 172-page publication aims to show that, in all likelihood, the origins of the world-altering pandemic known as Covid lie in laboratory experiments done for the most sinister of purposes in military laboratories in Beijing (specifically the 5th Institute at the Academy of Military Medical Science) and at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. But all the document does, in effect, is muddy the waters: What has been scientifically overdetermined to be true—that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the agent of Covid, originated by a natural evolutionary process—is presumed by its author, Robert P. Kadlec, the former (August 2017-January 2021) Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services (Preparedness and Response) to have sprung out of a lab leak, which was, possibly, a biological weapons experiment gone wrong.
That the worldwide pandemic of Covid-19 came out of a Chinese virology laboratory is also the official view of the White House and the United States government.
According to Kadlec, Chinese scientists may have hoped to develop a virological weapon that could alter people’s brains: a perfect device for non-lethal warfare and psychological control. He maintains that the virus somehow escaped one of the Wuhan laboratories where the work was being performed, to the so-called Huanan Seafood Market, a wet market, where it amplified and exploded, first throughout the city and then around the world. (One of those laboratories is 12 km away from the market and across a river, the other is a full 30 km away.)
Though Kadlec makes clear he doesn’t think the Chinese government deliberately released SARS-CoV-2, he believes it likely emerged from a biological weapons program designed to alter the brains of enemies and make them weaker and more compliant. The entire second installment of Muddy Waters is a farrago of data and argument designed to make this very point.
But Dr. Kadlec should know better. He has been working in the biological weapons field for decades (full disclosure: I interviewed him several times on some extremely sensitive subjects back in the late nineties and early two thousands). He was, reputedly, deeply familiar with the Soviet biological weapons program, which, though it shuttered in the mid 90s, has never been matched in its scientific reach and destructive power. He knows that creating novel viruses was never part of the Soviet weapons agenda.
The Soviet biologists, many of whom were serious scientists, didn’t bother with that: there are too many effective natural pathogens out there that only need a little tweaking, hardening off to survive drying air or ultraviolet light, weaponization (means of dispersal), to kill as effectively as you like. Some Soviet expat scientists did testify that attempts were made to enhance some pathogens’ brain-altering capacities, but many of these claims were likely fabulations, as Kadlec surely knows. The money that once poured in after the nearly forgotten episode of the anthrax letters in September 2001, on the heels of 9/11, has long ago dried up, and perhaps one can speculate that one aim of Muddy Waters may have been to restore funds and interest to the flagging biofense industry.
Project BioShield, which Kadlec helmed, a hefty government program set up after the anthrax attacks to promote and manage biodefense work aimed at protecting the nation from biological terrorism, did not go well., Kadlec was accused of funneling money to Emergent, a company producing anthrax vaccines, with which he was financially associated, as the Washington Post pointed out some years ago. He has also minimized the threat of natural pandemic disease in favor of guarding against bioweapons, and said in an interview with Rep Dan Crenshaw (also quoted in the Washington Post) that “Mother Nature is not a thinking enemy intent on inflicting grievous harm to our country, killing our citizens, undermining our government or destroying our way of life.”
Yet, Kaldec was appointed Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response of the Department of Health and Human Services by President Trump in his first administration. This man who never seems convinced of the threat posed by natural pandemics found himself leading government response during the worst pandemic in a hundred years, as Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in a scathing letter to him. He slashed the budget for pandemic preparedness in favor of biodefense. Emergent, a company with which he was affiliated, obtained huge grants for the manufacture and stockpiling of smallpox and anthrax vaccines.
The first Trump Administration appointed him to run Operation Warp Speed, the program designed to develop and fast-track new vaccines against the Covid pandemic, but his insistent focus on bioweapons and biodefense remains. Muddy Waters is, in effect, an outgrowth of that obsession. By minimizing the threat of a natural disease outbreak from “Mother Nature,” as he puts it in his 2012 Senate testimony, he long ago laid the groundwork for arguing that the greatest threat comes not from nature but from malignant human design.
It follows that Covid-19, devastating as it was, must have been deliberately engineered, rather than some blind emergence from hapless, random natural processes.
Dr. Kadlec should know better
The current Trump Administration nominated Kadlec to be Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Deterrence, Chemical and Biological Weapons Defense Policy and Programs in February, 2025; his Senate confirmations were held in November of this year. As of this writing, he has been confirmed—quietly.
Kadlec’s analysis is predicated on three assumptions: that dangerous work with coronaviruses was being done in one campus or another of the Wuhan Institute of Virology; that biosafety measures were severely lacking and Chinese scientists knew it; that coronavirus research fell within the purview of the Chinese military establishment, and was aimed at producing a biological weapon that works to produce brain damage. The entire structure rests on a single foundation: Did a novel, human-adapted, human-transmissible virus emerge from a Wuhan laboratory? If it did not, then all the rest of the 172-page work is called into question.
This critique, though it explores other matters Kadlec gets wrong, also rests on a single foundation: I argue here that Dr. Robert Kadlec and his associates don’t understand evolution, and that the origin of Covid is, above all, an evolutionary story. How did this pathogen come to exist? Was it the hand of natural selection (which has formed every other pathogen on the face of the earth), or the fist of some nefarious science? Fundamentally, did the coronavirus evolve naturally, or was it manipulated in a laboratory, likely for the military end of mind control?
If the Chinese military did build such a virus, they surely did not intend to release it on their own population. The release of SARS-CoV-2 was not a bioweapons attack, and on that, despite speculations from the wilder corners of the internet, it is rational to agree.
There are, therefore, two origin stories for the SARS-CoV-2. The first, one, subscribed to by the vast majority of virologists and evolutionary biologists who have written on the subject, is that the virus SARS-CoV-2 evolved naturally. The other origin story maintains that the virus either was cobbled together from bits and pieces in a laboratory, or was a natural bat virus that might have been passaged or manipulated, but in any event slipped somehow into the human species.
In his executive summary, Kadlec describes these sets of competing theories, “natural origin” versus “lab origin” in the following way:
It remains possible that SARS-CoV-2 itself, or a closely related precursor, could have arisen by natural recombination of these geographically distant strains in the wild, most likely originating in bats before circulating in a susceptible intermediate animal host. SARS-CoV-2 could have then entered the human population, from bats or from an intermediate animal host by a natural ‘spillover’ infection of a human near the site where it first arose, likely in southern China. It is also possible that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a natural recombination event and entered the human population in Wuhan—for example, a human could have been infected by a SARS-CoV-2-infected animal in or near the Wuhan wet market. It is also possible that SARS-CoV-2 arose via a natural recombination event and then entered the human population because of coronavirus research. SARS- CoV-2 or a closer viral relative may have been found in nature and subsequently transported to Wuhan, which is an epicenter of global coronavirus research. Collected bat specimens from across China and Southeast Asia were routinely shipped to and then studied in several Wuhan labs. SARS-CoV-2’s genetic components reflect extensive recombination of SARS-related viruses that are geographically distant. It is also possible, however, that SARS-CoV-2 might have arisen from more extensive lab manipulation. SARS-CoV-2 has a furin cleavage site (FCS) and at least one protein sequence that can bind to human integrins (cell-surface receptors) not seen in other SARS-related coronaviruses (subgenus sarbecovirus) before the pandemic.15,16 In addition, SARS-CoV-2’s ACE2 binding site is well adapted to human ACE2 receptors, which would not be expected in a newly emerged virus.
Kadlec favors the lab leak argument:
“Evidence, however, supports the likelihood that a progenitorvirus of SARS-CoV-2 was found in nature and subject to genetic engineering.”
How did this “progenitor virus…subject to genetic engineering” manage to break into the human species and cause a pandemic? Through—Kadlec maintains—a failure in biosecurity.
He insists that biosecurity and biosafety measures were poorly implemented in WIV labs, thus making a lab leak possible, and that Chinese scientists knew it. He proposed, in the first installment of Muddy Waters—published in December 2024—that, to remedy some of these defects, one of the laboratories of the Wuhan Virological Institute (located some 30 kilometers from the Huanan market) installed a $606,000,000 new air-conditioning system.
The installation of a half-a-billion-dollar air-conditioning system in a virology lab would indeed lead you to believe that something significant, and potentially sinister, is taking place in that laboratory.
According to Dr. Zach Hensel, a molecular biologist at the University of Lisbon who has published several scientific journal articles on Covid origins, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal both swallowed this astounding figure without quibbling. Hensel cites a Chinese researcher named Zichan Wang, formerly of the Xinhua News Agency and now at the (non-governmental) Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, who read the original documents in Chinese. Wang showed that Kadlec’s report inflated the cost of the air-conditioning system 1000 times, from $606,000 to $606,000,000.
(This error was corrected, without admission or acknowledgment, in the subsequent installment of Muddy Waters after Hensel, among others, wrote to Kadlec and pointed out the mistake.)
As we see in the long excerpt above, Kadlec’s method is to construct a dazzling tower of inference built on a stack of assertations, qualifications, misrepresentations, and outright falsehoods. Note the heaped inferences from the passage above: “could haves” “may haves,” “it is possibles” abound. When “may be,” “possibly,” “could be” is the way you layer assumption upon assumption, any assertion is possible.
But Kadlec proceeds as if all this heaped and piled argument amounts to proof. The following quote is taken verbatim from Kadlec’s video interview with Congressman Dan Crenshaw, and sums up his position quite well:
“There is a lot of evidence on the one hand about a laboratory event and virtually none for an animal-related event, and so if you look at that and taking that to court you’d basically side with hey there’s a preponderance of evidence.”
Despite the baldness of this statement, it’s palpably false. There is not a single shred of hard evidence linking Covid origins to a laboratory event. There are no early confirmed cases arising in the laboratory, in lab workers’ families, or in the neighborhoods of either of the Wuhan labs, which are many kilometers distant from the Huanan market. No one has demonstrated that a precursor virus was in the possession of the WIV—one betacoronavirus, known as RaTG13, was at the time the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 (96% similarity, but differences spanning the entire genome), but the lab apparently only had the viral sequence, not the virus itself (which it seems they failed to culture). At any rate, more closely-related viruses were later found in Laos.
No one has proven that the WIV ever attempted to create a novel coronavirus de novo, much less succeeded at doing so. Though many lab leakers have pointed fingers at the WIV laboratories, Kadlec himself doesn’t seem to believe that. He argues that the virus sprang from a military biological weapons program in a lab based in Beijing, putting him at odds with most lab leak advocates, and significantly complicating the idea that the transmission began in Wuhan and was amplified in the Huanan market.
A dazzling tower of inference
On the other hand, the noted evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey has painstakingly demonstrated that the vast majority of the earliest known cases of SARS-CoV-2 arose around the Huanan market, in a tour-de-force of historical and epidemiological analysis. Kadlec has no such evidence.
How does Kadlec deal with Worobey’s research, that ought to have stuck a dagger in the heart of any lab leak theory? By invoking the work of a well-known statistician named Dietrich Stoyan, who with his co-author Sung Nok Chiu argued that the epicenter of the outbreak was not actually the market, but some place nearby. As Alex Crits-Christoph puts it:
Chiu argued that the epicenter of the outbreak was not exactly centered on the market, but on a shopping mall very close-by called the Wanda Plaza, despite there being no epidemiological links to this location, nor virological explanation for how the virus would have arrived there. Both locations are still on the opposite side of the city from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, Stoyan and Chiu's work was re-analyzed by Débarre and Worobey who found they made geographical errors, uncorrected to this day. Their re-analysis confirmed that the epidemic epicenter was in fact so close to the Huanan market that it was in the market's parking lot.
In support of Stoyan and Chiu’s statistical attack on Worobey’s analysis, Kadlec cites the remarkable line:
“[Stoyan and Chiu’s work]…noted that ‘the analysis of the cases cannot rule out that places near the wet market are a possible origin.’”
It’s impossible to tell if Stoyan and Chiu think a parking lot or a commercial plaza could be “a possible origin” of a world-altering virological pandemic. Certainly Kadlec doesn’t think so—though he cites their work anyway, as a response to Worobey’s far more exact and thoughtful study.
It is strange to expect, however, that statistical analysis can somehow reveal an “exact center” of an explosive respiratory pandemic, as opposed to a “place of origin.” People infected with a contagious pathogen are moving targets, and Covid notoriously spreads from people who don’t even know they’re infected. Not everyone (some 32%) initially diagnosed with the virus shopped or worked at the market, but Worobey still found that even aside from those with direct contact, a preponderance of the early cases lived in the same vicinity. In a city of 12 million people, that fact is striking.
Unequivocally, the two lineages of SARS-CoV-2, Lineage A and Lineage B, thought to have arisen in the Huanan market, emerged first in the vicinity of that market and nowhere else—though Lineage B replaced Lineage A worldwide sometime later. If the early cases had instead appeared around either of the two virological laboratories affiliated with the WIV, Worobey’s method of analysis would have detected that pattern instead.
But still, Kadlec argues that the first Covid cases did, indeed, originate at the WIV. His evidence? He claims that three Wuhan virologists fell ill with Covid in November 2019, before the disease was ever identified, a claim that appears widely in the pro-lab leak literature. Kadlec told Crenshaw in their video interview that there was “evidence of ground-glass opacities”—lung destruction found commonly in early Covid cases—found in one of the researchers, suggesting that the illness that sent the three researchers for checkups at the hospital was Covid and not an ordinary upper-respiratory infection.
But one of these supposedly-infected scientists, a virologist named Ben Hu who worked with coronavirus sequences, not live infectious viruses, later openly rubbished the claim, denying that any of the three had Covid at all. According to Science magazine, Hu said “I did not get sick in autumn 2019, and did not have COVID-19-like symptoms at that time… My colleagues and I tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibody in early March 2020 and we were all negative.” A declassified US report did not find any evidence suggesting the three had ever been ill with Covid.
That is Kadlec’s only “evidence” for Covid ground zero being the Wuhan laboratories. And there are no neighborhood Covid cases, no explosions, no early centering about the lab, to back that claim up.
The science didn’t stop with Worobey’s initial paper. A 2024 paper published in Cell by Crits-Christoph, Worobey, and several other experts, looking back on earlier reports, has this to say about Covid origins:
Retrospective review of early COVID-19 cases identified 174 patients with onset in December 2019, 32% of whom had an ascertained link to this location, within a city of over 12 million.4Although some of the early case finding could have preferentially identified market-linked cases, a geospatial analysis of residences of the early cases with no identified link to the Huanan market showed that they lived unexpectedly close to and centered around the market,3,5 even though geographic proximity was not used as a case criterion.4,6,7,8 Additionally, excess pneumonia deaths were first reported in the city districts surrounding the Huanan market,4,6,7,8 and retrospective serosurveys of Wuhan confirmed that a larger proportion of residents contracted COVID-19 in these districts.9,10
Kadlec makes no reference to this research at all, but ignores it, as he is forced to do if he wants to argue that the there are no facts to justify the natural origins of Covid.
Things get worse: the 2024 Cell article, among others, demonstrates that carts and cages in the southwest area of the market, where live wild animals were kept, reveals RNA traces of both the SARS-CoV-2 virus and of live wild animal DNA: the bamboo rats, civets, and raccoon dogs that are thought by many to be the likely intermediate hosts for the precursor pandemic virus. Kadlec, both in his interview with Crenshaw and in MW insists that no infected animals have ever been found. But these cages are as close to a smoking gun as one can imagine, since all the animals for sale in the Huanan market were removed and likely slaughtered by January 1, 2020. This is indisputable. It is also, for Kadlec, unmentionable. He puts it this way:
‘No samples taken from any animals at the market, or from farms supplying the market or reported by the WHO, have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.”
But the matter is more complicated than that. Some animal carcasses were tested, but none of them were from the species likely to have harbored coronaviruses, like raccoon dogs and civet cats, as Crits-Christoph notes.
The DNA and RNA evidence does not lie. Raccoon dogs and civets were present at the market, and the cages in which they were held show genetic proof of SARS-CoV-2 contamination. As Hensel puts it, “an animal cage sample is an animal sample, just like it was for civet cages in the late 2003 [SARS-CoV-1] outbreak.”
The crowded conditions in the market, which we can truly call a disease factory, allowed for the jump (at least twice) of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population, and the rapid adaptation to a new host species. As the authors of the 2024 Cell article put it: “The high intensity of contact between humans and animals in markets26 suggests that once animals infected with a highly transmissible virus arrive in a market, multiple zoonotic events are primed to occur.”
Once the virus gained a toehold into humanity and began transmitting—given the numbers of new hosts and the easy access to those hosts the crowded market provided—eventual evolution towards greater human-to human transmissibility was predictable, as evolutionary logic suggests. The more transmissible strains of a particular virus will always outcompete those less transmissible. With the acquisition, within a few weeks, of a genetic modification of the spike protein (which the virus uses to enter and infect host cells) called D164G, evolution to greater transmission was well underway.
That evolutionary process has not ended: the viral strains with us today are descended from Omicron, a highly-transmissible viral lineage that was first detected in the late fall of 2021, and the original Wuhan strain has vanished.
The DNA and RNA evidence does not lie
Here we come to the crux of the problem with Kadlec’s entire thesis. He appears to believe that a human-adapted, transmissible new virus can arise in a laboratory through tweaking and passaging, even though this has never been done before and the knowledge to do it doesn’t appear to exist—certainly not in 2019.
Even if—and there is no evidence for it—the WIV or the Chinese military, or whatever suspect you want to point a finger at, got hold of a live, infectious bat precursor virus and passaged it in cell culture or in humanized mice (which are not, in any event, humans with human respiratory tracts) how could that produce a virus capable of not only infecting but spreading among humans? It couldn’t.
The knowledge to make a human-transmissible virus does not yet exist, because no one can specify the entire complex of genetic traits that produce transmissibility.
Looking at a genome and saying, ’This gene, and that one, and that one, are responsible for transmission among the human species,’ seems to be, at this point, something scientists cannot do yet. You can tweak a virus by changing specific alleles to infect human airway cells or humanized mice, and this has been done. But infection and transmission are very different phenomena. Infection of humanized mice, or human airway cells and transmission from person to person are not the same thing.
Kadlec refers to the Yunnan miners’ incident, where six miners, cleaning out a bat cave for guano (highly dangerous work) contracted a mysterious illness, perhaps a coronavirus, perhaps a fungus, and three of them died. The virologist Shi Zhengli, who is most often accused of involvement with the putative novel virus because of her work with bat viruses in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and her team collected samples from this cave and sequenced the viruses they found: this is the origin of the infamous RaTG13 virus which is 96% identical to the SARS-CoV-2 virus (though the different mutations are scattered all across the genome).
Many lab leakers, though not necessarily Kadlec, who plainly states in his Crenshaw interview that Dr. Shi is not to blame, suspect that RaTG13 was the virus jiggered by Dr. Shi to produce SARS-CoV-2. But infection is not transmission: the sick miners (assuming they were infected by a coronavirus at all) do not appear to have passed the disease on to anyone else.
Transmission is a high bar; most spillover infections from animal populations never adapt enough to allow transmission from one human host to another. Perhaps we can call transmission and adaptation essentially the same thing. That can’t be said for dead-end infections, no matter how effectively they exploit human tissues or how lethal they are.
RaTG13 could not have been the direct ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, because RaTG13 likely lacks the ability to transmit from person to person. It would almost certainly have to be altered in some way to do that. There is no known case of a virus directly out of a bat transmitting effectively from person to person. As Columbia virologist Vincent Racaniello once told me, “No virus has ever come out of a bat ready to go”—by which he meant, in the context, “effectively transmit.” Bat viruses often can and do sicken people; what they don’t appear to have done, without other intermediate species, is turn into pandemics.
Could any Chinese scientists, including the Beijing vaccinologists Kadlec prefers to Dr. Shi as creators of SARS-CoV-2, have deliberately spliced in the genetic features that allow transmission? In short, no—since no one knows what those features are. Could the scientists have done so accidentally? Since transmission is a complex process which induces one host to shed pathogens and allows another to pick it up, get infected, and in turn pass the pathogen on, it is unlikely that any random passaging in cell culture or through infecting humanized mice could accidently produce a human-adapted germ.
But let’s grant that somehow one or another of the Chinese teams stumbled on the exact recipe which would allow them to make the RaTG13 virus, or another coronavirus, transmissible. You still must account for the dog that didn’t bark: the absence of infections among the team, elsewhere in the laboratory, in the lab neighborhoods, in the scientists’ families. You have to posit, instead, that an asymptomatically-infected scientist wandered straight down to the Huanan market without infected anyone else along the way (a distance of 10 to 20 kilometers depending on which laboratory the work was done in), walked to the southwest corner, coughed on a raccoon dog or two, and then walked out, again without infecting anyone else.
This is the “amplifying” scenario, where the lab-created disease was thought to have been introduced to the animal market by an errant scientist, where it infected both animals and people, and exploded across Wuhan, and the world, within weeks.
Kadlec maintains that natural evolution cannot account for the origins of the Covid coronavirus, since the infamous FCS—the furin cleavage site on the coronavirus spike that allows SARS-CoV-2 to splice open human airways cells, enter and infect them—does not exist in any sarbecoviruses in the region. To find an FCS, you would have to journey thousands of miles away, and find a coronavirus very distant genetically from the sarbecovirus family to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs. Virologist Gustavos Palacios of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York and his team of distinguished virologists suggest that recombination among distant coronaviruses does not occur, which they suggest in a 20-page paper. So, the furin cleavage site, which had never been seen before in a sarbecovirus, had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere must only be from a lab.
But is recombination the only natural source for such changes? I spoke to evolutionary biologist and virologist Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney, famous for having visited the Huanan wild animal market in 2014 and remarking that the place looked like ground zero for the next pandemic. Holmes points out that mutations occur in viruses all the time, including ones that might throw up a furin cleavage site, and that if the conditions are right, natural selection will seize on the mutation and install it, as it were, in the viral genome.
“It’s Evolution 101,” he said.
Kadlec, and Palacios, seem to overlook the fact that the main drivers of evolutionary change are mutation and selection, and that it is incorrect to think that recombination is the only or even the primary source of genetic novelty.
“No virus has ever come out of a bat ready to go”
The hand-waving that characterizes Muddy Waters is also evident in the claim that General Zhou, a deceased Chinese vaccinologist who headed the 5th Institute at the Academy of Military Medical Science, had prior knowledge of the pandemic well before any outbreak was identified. This allowed him to prepare a proposal to develop a candidate vaccine by February 24, 2020, only a few short weeks after a pandemic was declared. Here is the discussion in full (italics mine):
No later than November 2019 and likely earlier, a senior PLA researcher began developing one of two early SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Brigadier General Yusen Zhou from the Beijing Academy of Military Medical Sciences’ (AMMS) Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology collaborated with the WIV prior to the pandemic.427 General Zhou was an accomplished coronavirus vaccinologist, who had published extensively on vaccines related to SARS-CoV-1 and MERS. General Zhou was likely conducting coronavirus vaccine-related research at the WIV no later than the Fall of 2019. He coauthored a paper with WIV researcher Shi Zhengli in November 2019 on adverse effects associated with SARS-related vaccines and antibody treatments.428 On February 24, 2020, General Zhou submitted, with colleagues from the Institutes of Microbiology and Epidemiology and two researchers from the AMMS Institute of Military Cognition and Brain Sciences, one of the first patent applications for a COVID-19 vaccine.429….
The work described in the patent application required access to SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein sequence and access to live SARS-CoV-2 virus. Work described in the application was based on a published two-step approach used to develop his MERS RBD vaccine in 2017 (Figure 7).442 That initial MERS effort took approximately four months to produce a similar RBD-Fc vaccine construct from a genetic sequence, as General Zhou described in the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine patent application.443
In other words, Dr. Zhou submitted a Covid vaccine patent long before he should have been able to, given the supposed timing of the outbreak, the end of December. It took four months to produce a similar MERS vaccine candidate. Therefore, Dr. Zhou must have known well in advance of December that SARS-CoV-2 existed. So, according to Kadlec, long before the disease broke out, General Zhou knew to begin developing a vaccine for it.
Unfortunately for Kadlec’s sleuthing, as Worobey and Crits-Christoph pointed out to me, Merck submitted its own vaccine patent in the United States on February 24, four days before Zhou did.
In both cases, the vaccine platform already existed, and merely had to be reconfigured to suit the new pathogen. There is nothing mysterious about it—no skullduggery involved in Dr. Zhou’s vaccine work, and the insinuation stains the dead vaccinologist’s reputation when he can no longer defend himself.
“It’s Evolution 101”
The second part of Muddy Waters examines Kadlec’s thesis that the creation of SARS-CoV-2 stemmed from Chinese interest in developing a strategic weapon for non-lethal but mind-altering neurological warfare. That Covid can sometimes cause brain fog and other neurological difficulties is certain. But it is also irrelevant. The entire edifice of the second installment—replete with discussion of Chinese intentions and the possible existence of an advanced Chinese biological weapons program—rests on the same bale of straw shoring up the rest of the piece.
Whether the Chinese military really wishes to develop neurological weapons I do not know. I simply argue that, since SARS-CoV-2 was not and could not have been created in a lab, the entire argument that the virus was designed to alter or destroy our brains is null and void.
SARS-CoV-2 arose from a natural evolutionary process in the crowded animal/human disease factory that was the Huanan market, and not the result of lab tinkering or a lab escape at all. It is noteworthy that the most sophisticated and advanced biological weapons program in history—that of the Soviet Union—apparently never tried to produce a novel pathogen: there were five departments in Biopreparate, and all of them involved tweaking existing live, existing pathogens in various ways, including, possibly, alteration of mental status (though some of these accounts, like the ones I cite in my own book, Plague, are quite disputable). One could certainly say that biology has advanced greatly since 1991, when the program was (supposedly) shuttered. But the Soviet bioweaponeers did not even appear to entertain the creation of new germs as a goal, perhaps because they knew better.
As for the biosafety issues in Chinese laboratories, I don’t know how adequate they are, or how they could or should be improved. The risk of lab leaks is real, as I have argued elsewhere. But it is inescapably true that no novel lab-created pathogen has ever escaped from a lab—because no scientist has ever created a functioning, human-adapted, transmissible novel pathogen. So all of Dr. Kadlec’s concerns about lab safety amount, in this instance, to perilously little.
The production of Muddy Water required immense effort, considerable sleuthing, a monumental dedication of time and resources. But it is an edifice erected on the shakiest of foundations. Dr. Kadlec, expert though he is in biological weapons, grateful as the nation must be to him for his leadership of Operation Warp Speed, isn’t served well by the publication of this piece. Rather than helping pinpoint the origins of the Covid pandemic, Muddy Waters is ultimately an exercise in misdirection.
We are ill-served if the approach taken here, irredeemably flawed as it is, is taken for truth, and the real culprit for the pandemic, the live wild animal trade, is allowed to continue.
Then it’s only a matter of time before the next pandemic, forged in yet another wild animal/human nexus, another such factory for novel human disease, explodes again across the world.
