It’s the greatest scientific mystery of this century. Did the Covid-19 virus originate in a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan, the Chinese city that also happens to be home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Or can it be traced back to dangerous Chinese military research being carried out into coronaviruses at the virology institute itself?

Scientists are now convinced the pandemic that swept the world was almost certainly triggered by a leak from the Wuhan Institute which had teamed up with the Chinese military to carry out extremely risky research, according to new information that is emerging.

Investigators who’ve been combing through mountains of evidence and talking to experts around the globe are convinced the deadly Covid-19 virus which has killed millions came into being as a result of experiments that started out as a vaccine-hunt but later turned into a quest for a lethal bio-weapon.

“I am getting more and more convinced that the virus leaked from a military experiment gone awry due to poor biosafety and biosecurity. There are just too many smoking guns at this point,” says eminent Indian virologist Shahid Jameel.

The mystery begins deep inside a mineshaft of an abandoned copper mine in Mojiang in Yunnan province where, in 2016, Chinese researchers stumbled upon a till-then unknown coronavirus. The discovery was initially reported to the Americans who were funding their research. But later, the Chinese began to wrap the investigation under deep layers of secrecy, says The Sunday Times in a detailed expose.

Also, the Chinese military began to be closely associated with the coronavirus research being carried out at Wuhan Institute. In particular, a leading role was played by Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist. Zhou came under the spotlight when he filed for a vaccine patent Covid-19 in February 2020, barely five weeks after first Covid-19 cases were officially reported by the Chinese. Scientists say it’s virtually impossible to develop a vaccine at such high speed.

Even more mysteriously, Zhou died in May 2020, aged just 54. US investigators are said to have been told that “Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan Institute.” Even though he had received many awards, Zhou’s death was kept almost secret.

At the start, the Wuhan Institute, under its director Shi Zhengli, was working in coordination with US government-funded institutes and even receiving grants from them. However, after the discoveries and events at Mojiang, the flow of information from the Chinese gradually slowed to a trickle.

The Chinese concealed the fact that people had died at Mojiang exhibiting symptoms very similar to SARS. Most of the research carried on at the Wuhan Institute and backed by the Americans was to discover a vaccine that could tackle SARS which had devastated East Asia in the early 2000s.

“Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic,” says The Sunday Times. This, says the newspaper, was when “the trail of papers starts to go dark.”

The theory, described in detail by The Sunday Times, is not an entirely new one. In May 2020 a scientist couple from Pune, Monali Rahalkar and her husband Rahul Bahulikar, outlined almost exactly the same sequence of events in a paper which focused on six miners who had been been employed to clean bat faeces in the Mojiang mine and who had developed pneumonia-like symptoms. Three of the miners later died.

There were others, too, who were sceptical about the theory the Chinese were keen to spread – that Covid most likely emerged from a wet market in Wuhan where live animals were sold.

Beijing has called the lab leak theory “erroneous” and a 2022 paper published by the journal Environmental Research came out strongly against the Rahalkar/Bahulikar theory, arguing that the Mojiang workers did not develop either Covid-19 or even SARS. The paper insisted that SARS-CoV-2 was not present in the Mojiang mine. The paper said: “Dismissing the Mojiang mine theory leaves the laboratory leak narrative without any scientific support, thus making it simply an opinion-based narrative.”

“This paper shows no direct link between the Mojiang mine virus and SARS-CoV2. But it cannot answer if the former was engineered to produce the latter or a close relative,” says virologist Jameel.

Investigators say this leak came after risky but legitimate research with inadequate safeguards, carried out in the hope of finding the Holy Grail: a vaccine for SARS and other coronavirus-linked illnesses. But they believe more likely is that it the result of the laboratory taking minimal safeguards while raising the risk barometer doing experiments it was being told to do by the Chinese army that was increasingly calling the shots? To put it even more bluntly: the Chinese army was hoping to create a bio-weapon for which it could create a vaccine but which would be lethal for its enemies.

Says one US investigator: “My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual-use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.US investigators now say, “the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.”

“This led to the creation of the Covid-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident. It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” one investigator told The Sunday Times.

What was happening at Wuhan Institute was almost certainly extremely risky, ‘gain-of-function’ research under which viruses are made more potent in order to make it easier to create a vaccine.

In fact, some gain-of-function work was being carried on in a US-China collaboration taking place at the Wuhan Institute under the guidance of Dr Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. Baric’s team inserted the “spike gene” of a virus found in the Mojiang cave called SHC014 into the copy of a SARS virus.

To test the effect of these lab-created mutant viruses on people, he created “humanised” mice by injecting them with genes that gave them ‘lungs and vascular systems mimicking humans’. Many researchers at the time felt both teams had overstepped safety limits.

In 2014, the US National Institutes of Health got a $3.7 million government grant for gain of function experiments that created a combined Sars copy with another virus SHC014 that was a potential mass killer, causing severe lung damage in humanised mice.

At the same time, the US agency gave $630,000 to the Wuhan Institute which accelerated its own lab work using Baric’s techniques.

Much of the Wuhan Institute’s experimentation was taking place in what’s called Biosafety Level-2 (BSL-2) which is a very low safety level. Says Jameel: “This should never have been allowed in BSL-2. We are talking about respiratory pathogens. Chinese labs have lax procedures.”

Later experiments went even further. One specific experiment, says The Sunday Times, involved inserting what’s called a “furin cleavage site” in a virus to make them more lethal.

Significantly, Covid-19 turned out to be the first SARS-like coronavirus with a furin cleavage site. Also the Wuhan lab was creating nine different coronavirus variants. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, the Wuhan Institute was investigating whether mutant viruses they had created could spark a pandemic. US government investigators believe that the Chinese military was funding a secret project at the institute on developing dangerous viruses that could be weaponised.

Speaking last month Professor George Gao, former head of China’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), said the lab leak theory could not be discounted. Gao, an internationally respected virologist, told BBC Radio 4: “That's science. Don't rule out anything.”

Gao, now president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, said the Chinese government had organised an investigation to establish Covid’s origins. He added: “I think their conclusion is that they are following all the protocols. They haven't found any wrongdoing."