In an exclusive interview in Wuhan, China, a middle-aged horseshoe bat recently disclosed his involvement in the earliest stages of the spread of Covid-19.

“I couldn’t continue any longer in good conscience,” admitted the male bat from Manchuria. “Watching how the virus origin debate was tearing people apart made it harder and harder for me to live with myself. I finally decided to tell the truth.”

Fearing reprisal, the bat chose to remain anonymous. In early March 2023 he flew back to the very meat market where it all started.

“I first had to apologize to the butcher I had bitten. The back of his fleshy neck was very inviting, but he didn’t deserve what I did.”

The bat described how he knew he was carrying a novel virus; his hang-tight buddy group had actually egged him on to ‘go start something big.’ They all agreed that humans were pushing things too far with vivisections on bats. The flight to Wuhan was in the early part of October 2019. The bat went to the main open-air wet market, knowing very well how such markets have a ‘germy’ reputation.

“It’s always a tough call,” the bat said. “On one hand you really want to draw blood from a creature, but on the other you know you’ll likely transmit something and possibly make their life miserable.” The bat said it was not easy to apologize to the butcher, but it was even harder to tell the reporter what he had started.

Wuhan news reporter Xi Wang was first to secure an interview and passed the transcript to NPR and BBC correspondents.

“I just hope it settles all of the debates about the source of infection with respect to the coronavirus.” The bat described how troubling it was to think how people were becoming more mistrustful of scientific research. At the same time, a growing movement of bats have expressed concern for the way people are blaming them with use of the term ‘natural causes.’

A leader of Bats Are Better explained how bats have gotten a bad rap from humans for being spreaders of disease. “Just because we suck blood doesn’t mean we are germ-ridden,” she said. “We’re as much a part of Nature as people are, and we’re sick and tired of being scapegoated.”

Bats Are Better leaflets which promote basic animal rights explain how bats are not theoretically opposed to cooperation with human beings in laboratory settings. “Experimentation with bat-carrying viruses is important for all creatures.” Their main objection is how humans, by association, assume that because bats are used in research, they can cause a worldwide pandemic.

Okay, yes. April Fools. All tongue-in-cheek.

In all seriousness, there actually was a man from Wuhan’s downtown meat market as represented by the butcher above. He participated in a real-life interview with a Wuhan reporter last December, describing how a bat, on Oct. 8, 2019, bit him on the shoulder.

The reporter delayed release of information for three months while determining the wisest route of dissemination. The worker did experience acute symptoms within hours of the bite, but due to his grandmother’s expertise in folkway medicines and nutrition, a regimen of garlic bulbs and lemons, with other herbal remedies, made quick work of the virus.

The diseased victim did observe how other workers with whom he had close dealings had contracted similar flu-like symptoms. He noted longer times of recovery for most of them; none of them died. He has chosen to remain anonymous, however, he has met with doctors who conducted blood tests to verify his claims.

Altogether, this admission of bat-bite origins by someone working in the ‘ground zero’ zone of Wuhan’s meat market has now provided the missing evidence to vindicate a natural cause theory for the source of the coronavirus. This revelation conclusively discredits the so-called lab-leak theory with “high confidence.”

Okay, yes. Second time around, too. April Fools. Thank you for reading this far. None of the above is true; it’s all made up in the spirit of foolery. But, let me qualify this last phrase: in the spirit of truth-telling foolery. For I am now about to take you down a completely new path to show a different set of truths.

But first, I want to present two words: evidence and probability. Let those words hang as we consider some backdrop information to Wuhan being the epicenter for the outbreak.
Let’s think about the odds of a natural zoological infection happening in the very city where highly sophisticated laboratory work is being done on bat-based coronaviruses which can be genetically modified to infect humans. The outbreak did not start in Hong Kong; it did not start in Calcutta; It started in Wuhan.

Bear in mind there are only two other places on the globe where research has been done on SARS and corona-related viruses of the sort studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology: University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. According to lead researcher Ralph Baric from UNC, “Most of the research in our laboratory has used coronaviruses as models to study the genetics of RNA virus transcription, replication, persistence and cross species transmission.”

In 2014, Baric’s research was deemed by Congress to be too risky to continue in the U.S. Why risky? If there was a lab leak, it would pose a very grave danger to US (pun intended). With major orchestration from Anthony Fauci, $3.7 million dollars was diverted to the China-based EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit to scope out coronaviruses in bats; $600,000 (from a NIH grant) went to the Wuhan lab until 2019 to advance the research.

On Nov. 10, 2015, the University of Minnesota released a news brief: “SARS-like bat coronavirus able to jump to humans.” Curiously enough, UNC researchers were credited with inserting a spike protein of a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats in China into a SARS virus which demonstrated replication “in primary human airway cells in the lung, the preferred target for the infection.”

In short, a modified hybrid virus in the lab, you could say, had ‘gained the function’ of infecting human cells without going through a genetic mutation.

Presumably, as Baric admits, this work is geared toward the protection of society; public health needs to be one step ahead. But here is the real question: Why did Fauci want to continue funding risky research in a laboratory that had less expertise and less safe-guards than previously offered by Baric in Chapel Hill? What was at stake for Fauci?

And who did he fund? Two key players had collaborated together well before Congress applied the moratorium: Dr. Zhengli Shi, Director of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the so-called Bat Woman), and Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, and principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) and Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID) grant. Both were heavily funded by and through the Fauci-led NIH.

Daszak was the architect of the pivotal letter appearing in The Lancet on Feb. 19, 2020, which stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” He reached out to fellow scientists, suggesting the letter represented the opinion of a broad range of scientists. To minimize his role, Daszak assured the 26 co-signers that the letterhead would not have EcoHealth Alliance’s logo.

Conspiracy theories about the pandemic in mid-February 2020? Americans were barely learning about the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Was Daszak anticipating the rise of conspiracy theories? Or was he seeding them? Whatever, it was a great foil that worked. Predictably, Daszak went on the offence that winter, calling the lab-leak scenario “preposterous,” “baseless,” and “pure baloney.” Mainstream media sang along.

Now, three years later, mainstream media is trying to save face by inching their way back into the conversation of lab-leak probability. We can no longer hope for hard evidence; the Chinese government has done well to wipe away the tracks. But any prosecuting attorney understands that a lack of hard evidence does not mean there is no “probable cause.” The latter means something; it can carry weight.

Again, the lead question: what are the odds of a natural zoological infection happening in the very city where highly sophisticated laboratory work (with, I might add, questionable safeguards) is being done on bat-based coronaviruses which can also be genetically modified to infect humans?

If I was a seasoned poker player, I would say the odds of natural causes in that particular city are extremely low. With direct evidence being hard to track, the rising data supporting probable cause would be the leading factor. If evidence is important to you, then note that no animals in the Wuhan region have been found with that strain of virus.

There’s much more that others have surfaced than I have time to cover. You can read about ‘furin cleavage’ in coronaviruses; you can read about the breakdown of lab safeguards. If you want to do a deep dive into the US-Wuhan entanglement, read articles by investigative journalist Katherine Eban, an independent writer for Vanity Fair. Her lab leak series spans from June 3, 2021 to March 1, 2023. Her March 31, 2022, piece is revealing. These are long articles, so sit in a comfortable chair.

Help me out, scientists. Are you believing that a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus infected someone a few miles from the world’s top laboratory for examining and engineering novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses? Is it your scientific consensus that this was a coincidence? Are you aware that the closest relatives of the outbreaking virus, nine to be exact, were in the Wuhan lab freezer?

Evidence can be erased. Probability has a way of sticking around.

Why did so many people, good people, stop thinking about probable cause? “Evil comes from a failure to think,” wrote Hannah Arendt. “Propaganda begins when dialogue ends,” wrote Jacques Ellul. Today’s challenge, as we try to crawl out of the sad pit of fruitless information wars, is to recover both thinking and dialogue.

Back to bats. Maybe we human beings should be the ones to apologize to the bats. “We’re sorry for the way we manipulated your nature-bred virus, and then, if that was not enough, placed you unfairly in a place of deep suspicion, even blame, playing upon the human fear of germs, linking you to wet-markets, referencing even your feces, and altogether disrespecting your rightful place in the circle of life. Can you ever forgive us?!”