In his latest report for The Disinformation Chronicle, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker presents a timeline of the “conspiracy to deny” the theory that Covid-19 may have resulted from a lab leak. He’s previously helped reveal “Twitter Files” documents, shedding light on the inner workings of the “censorship-industrial complex.”

Now, in his latest report for The Disinformation Chronicle, investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker presents a timeline of the “conspiracy to deny” the theory that Covid-19 may have resulted from a lab leak.

According to Thacker, four years after the virus appeared, this “conspiracy to deny” the lab-leak theory continues. In one recent example, Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, who conducted gain-of-function research alongside scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, said at a conference that the pandemic started through zoonosis – spillover of the virus from an animal to humans.

“We know this is misleading and dishonest, and that much of the evidence points to a lab accident by Daszak’s colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Thacker wrote.

This evidence, Thacker said, was known to scientists soon after Covid-19 appeared.

“Virologists knew within a month after the pandemic began in 2019 that the Covid virus appeared genetically manipulated and that it may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China – a lab that was funded by Anthony Fauci at the NIH [National Institutes of Health],” he wrote.

Yet, Thacker said, “Instead of explaining this to the public, these scientists launched a misinformation campaign with complicit science writers to label critics ‘conspiracy theorists’ and misdirect attention away from their research colleagues and funders as the possible cause of so many deaths and unimaginable economic catastrophe.”

As part of this misinformation campaign, Thacker wrote, the same scientists, along with complicit figures in government and the media, labelled any speech that questioned the official Covid-19 narrative as “misinformation.”

Thacker said government agencies continue to perpetuate a cover-up of the lab-leak theory. “The NIH has hidden what it knows and when it knew it, and is ignoring Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.”

The FOIA requests came from several organisations that are now suing the NIH “to force compliance with FOIA so they can gain access to public documents.” Yet even when the NIH responds, “They still hide information by heavily redacting documents,” according to Thacker.

In one instance, “The Intercept sued the NIH for documents on the pandemic’s origin and received 92 pages that were fully redacted,” Thacker wrote.

Nevertheless, Thacker said, “Multiple lawsuits against the NIH continue to move forward and uncover more and more evidence of what the government knew and when NIH officials knew it.”

Thacker, who was recently interviewed by producer Vanessa Dylyn for an upcoming documentary about the damage the pandemic caused to society, said he received “6 pages of questions” concerning the possible lab accident at Wuhan, which he decided to turn into an article.

“So much has happened since December 31, 2019, when the World Health Organization was notified of a new pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China,” Thacker wrote. “Instead of going over how this all unfolded over four years, I decided to lay out what happened, based on what we now know. It’s been a long, tough journey.”

According to Thacker, much of what we learned about the Wuhan cover-up leaked out over time, because Fauci and others in the government have been hiding information from the public and virologists such as Scripps Research’s Kristian Andersen have been “lying to a complicit media.”

“We only learned last July, for example, that Andersen didn’t believe the conclusions from the ‘Proximal Origins’ paper he published in Nature Medicine that denigrated the possibility of a Wuhan lab accident,” Thacker wrote.

“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published in March 2020 and became “one of the single most impactful and influential scientific papers in history.”

A report by the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released in July found that Fauci and other key scientists and government officials used the paper as a means to suppress the Covid-19 lab-leak theory.

Such efforts at a cover-up began almost immediately after the pandemic’s outbreak, even as scientists privately admitted that a lab leak was highly likely to have occurred.

“A month after the pandemic’s outbreak in Wuhan, China, on New Year’s Eve 2019, a press officer at the National Institutes of Health emailed pandemic talking points to Anthony Fauci, who was leading the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),” Thacker wrote.

“The press officer noted that Fauci’s NIAID funded many of the world’s coronavirus experts, including Peter Daszak of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, and Ian Lipkin of Columbia University,” he added.

The January 27, 2020, email noted that Fauci was funding coronavirus research conducted by Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance in China and had been doing so “for the past five years” and that the two were “among the biggest players in coronavirus work.”

At around the same time, “Fauci had also begun a series of calls and emails with various virologists,” including Andersen, who told Fauci in an email that “some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” referring to the Covid-19 virus, adding that the virus showed characteristics not consistent with “expectations with evolutionary theory.”

On February 1, 2020, a conference call followed, organised by Jeremy Farrar, then-director of the Wellcome Trust, described by Thacker as “one of the world’s largest funders of virology research.” Fauci, Andersen and other prominent virologists participated in the call, which Farrar asked “everyone to treat in total confidence.”

Later that day, in an email to government scientists, including Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the NIH, Fauci said, “The call with Jeremy Farrar (Wellcome Trust) went very well.” Yet, Fauci acknowledged the possibility that Covid-19 was engineered.

“They were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCoV, there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted,” Fauci wrote.

In the email, Fauci made another key acknowledgment: “Scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.”

“These emails show that Fauci and many of the world’s top virologists knew by February 1, 2020, that Fauci was funding EcoHealth Alliance to do coronavirus research in China and that the Covid virus did not seem natural,” Thacker wrote.

“But instead of alerting the public, emails show that Fauci, Farrar, and multiple virologists began plotting to deny these same suspicions by orchestrating the publication of three scientific papers to label the possibility of a lab accident a ‘conspiracy theory,’” he added.

According to Thacker, three scientific papers played a key role in perpetuating the zoonotic theory of Covid-19’s origins – and in labelling opposing narratives as “conspiracy theories.”