Six Years After the COVID-19 Catastrophe: The Truth About Wuhan Cannot Be Buried, and the Chinese Communist Party Must Be Held Responsible for the Global Pandemic [Zhiding Lecture Enlightenment Forum by Miles Yu] EP269
This article explores the issue of origin tracing on the sixth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, pointing out that the virus's origin is highly correlated with a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The article details the laboratory's sample collection, qualifications for handling high-risk pathogens, biosafety hazards, and multiple prior warnings. It also criticizes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its cover-up behaviors under an authoritarian regime, such as issuing gag orders, destroying samples, and obstructing World Health Organization investigations during the early stages of the pandemic, arguing that the CCP must be held morally, legally, and financially responsible for the global pandemic.
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Welcome to the Enlightenment Forum of the Zhiding Lecture Hall. I am Miles Yu. Six years ago, COVID-19 devastated the globe, bringing the world to a near standstill. Today, we can no longer use euphemisms to gloss over the facts; the Chinese Communist Party must bear direct responsibility for the outbreak of this deadly virus. At the critical moment during the early stages of the pandemic, it systematically withheld information, and to this day, it continues to obstruct investigations, preventing the world from fully clarifying what exactly happened in Wuhan. Since the outbreak, evidence supporting the link between the virus's origin and research activities has been mounting, and this evidence points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, making it increasingly difficult to deny.
In June 2026, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) publicly stated that the coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was funded by the United States, and this research is now widely regarded as the source of an accidental laboratory leak. This leak triggered the global pandemic. With this conclusion, the series of developments leading up to the outbreak can no longer be viewed as mere coincidences. For years, the CCP has ambitiously pursued global leadership in the fields of virus discovery and experimentation. However, China's biosafety system has consistently suffered from severe deficiencies, with the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the heart of this effort. Before it became China's first Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory, it had collected over 15,000 bat virus samples, which was the largest repository of its kind in the world at the time. Later, the central health authorities of the CCP regime approved it to store and handle Risk Group 4 microorganisms, a category that includes the world's most dangerous viruses, as well as coronaviruses and their more lethal, laboratory-enhanced variants.
However, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China rated it only as "good," a mediocre performance, and it was not included among the nation's 20 "excellent" biological and medical laboratories. Even so, Chinese authorities still approved it to handle the world's most dangerous pathogens, and it was the only laboratory in the country to receive this qualification. Dr. Yuan Zhiming, who served as the director of the BSL-4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time, had warned multiple times that China's biosafety operations suffered from serious deficiencies, including inadequate biosafety management, imperfect laboratory operations, a shortage of professional biosafety personnel, and insufficient training. In 2018, Yuan and his co-authors issued a highly prescient warning in a paper. They pointed out that biosafety laboratories are a "double-edged sword" that can benefit humanity but could also lead to "disaster." The paper also itemized the severe biosafety deficiencies in Chinese biological laboratories, with issues including a lack of operating standards and professional guidelines, as well as problems involving waste disposal, disinfection, contamination monitoring, and laboratory safety procedures.
These warnings were not just theoretical. As early as 2004, a SARS virus leak occurred at a laboratory in Beijing, resulting in multiple infections, hundreds of people being quarantined, and at least one death. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had already received ample warning, which clearly illustrated the potential consequences of dangerous pathogens meeting weak biosafety protocols. However, the Wuhan Institute of Virology continued to conduct complex research on the very type of virus that could trigger another SARS-like outbreak. In 2015, Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now infamous worldwide as the "Bat Woman of Wuhan," participated in a study that synthesized a chimeric SARS-like coronavirus to understand its ability to infect human populations. The subsequently published paper described a hybrid virus carrying spike proteins from a Chinese horseshoe bat coronavirus.
In March 2019, nine months before COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, Shi Zhengli and her research team warned that it was highly likely that a SARS or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus outbreak would re-emerge. They also pointed out that the probability of such an outbreak occurring in China was increasing. Then, the outbreak actually occurred in Wuhan—not Beijing, not Shanghai, and not Yunnan. Many bats carrying SARS-related coronaviruses were collected from Yunnan, yet the outbreak happened in Wuhan. China's most important research institution for such viruses is located in this city, and researchers here were conducting gain-of-function experiments that could make viruses more lethal. A laboratory accident does not require a conspiracy; it only requires a pathogen, high-risk research, inadequate safety protocols, and a human error—all of which were present in China at the time.
What happened next turned the entire incident from a scientific failure into an indictment of the CCP's political system. Beijing's instinctual reaction was not transparency, but control. From the beginning, central health authorities in China issued a gag order to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. On January 1, 2020, the institute was ordered to destroy all collected coronavirus samples. A few days later, the People's Liberation Army took over the laboratory. Later, the Wuhan Institute of Virology issued an open letter responding to various external questions regarding genetic engineering, laboratory leaks, military involvement, and the alleged disappearance of a former employee. The open letter provided no detailed evidence to clarify these doubts. Instead, all employees of the institute were required to unite around the CCP Central Committee and Comrade Xi Jinping.
This response highlights the root of the problem: a laboratory capable of affecting the health of all humanity existed within an authoritarian political system. Under this system, the CCP holds ultimate control over scientists, research records, journalists, and various institutions. Even Xi Jinping admitted that this system had failed. On February 14, 2020, in his first public remarks after the outbreak, Xi explicitly stated that the Wuhan epidemic exposed China's shortcomings and loopholes in biomaterials and biosafety management. He called for the formulation of a new Biosafety Law and ordered that biosafety be incorporated into China's national security system.
Furthermore, there is the evidence that Beijing refuses to hand over. The CCP ordered the destruction of samples from early patients in Wuhan, making it more difficult to trace the virus's origin, and this obstruction continues to hinder investigations into the pandemic's origins. In 2025, five years after the outbreak, the World Health Organization disclosed that China still had not provided hundreds of early SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences from the pandemic, nor had it provided detailed data on animals sold in the Wuhan market. The data requested by the WHO regarding the research content and biosafety status of various laboratories in Wuhan have also not been handed over. Because this information has not yet been publicly released, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that all origin hypotheses must remain under consideration, including a laboratory origin. It is precisely for this reason that Beijing cannot use the remaining uncertainty as an excuse for exemption; no government can destroy or withhold evidence and then demand that the outside world exonerate it on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
The responsibility of the CCP cannot be measured solely by what happened inside the laboratory; it also extends to the handling of the situation after the outbreak. Faced with an emerging infectious disease, this authoritarian regime acted according to the ways of an authoritarian system: suppressing information, demanding political obedience, controlling the narrative, and resisting independent scrutiny. Therefore, the responsibility for COVID-19 should be borne by those who truly hold political power: the Chinese Communist Party and the institutions under its control. When dealing with a contagious respiratory virus, delays cost lives, and the final price paid by the world was almost unimaginably high. Millions of people lost their lives—according to World Health Organization estimates, the global death toll reached 14.5 million—countless families were torn apart, trillions of dollars in wealth and economic activity vanished, and an entire generation experienced a catastrophe that should never have happened.
The international community should demand that the Wuhan Institute of Virology fully open its virus databases, laboratory notes, experimental records, sample inventories, biosafety records, and personnel files. Scientists and staff members who possess information related to the epidemic should also be permitted to speak to independent investigators without being monitored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Governments around the world should also establish enforceable international accountability measures; any country that conceals epidemic information capable of triggering a global pandemic must bear international consequences. COVID-19 has proven that biosafety within the borders of a sovereign state is by no means merely a matter of domestic affairs—a laboratory accident in one city can close schools in London, and can overwhelm hospitals in New York. It can also force businesses in Tokyo to close and take the lives of the elderly in Buenos Aires. Sovereignty cannot arbitrarily grant a country the right to endanger all of humanity, and the world must rethink whether any laboratory conducting research with potential global consequences can continue to operate in the absence of substantive international verification. The CCP cannot be allowed to let this disaster be buried by history before it is held accountable. The world has the right to know the truth, victims have the right to justice, and the CCP must be held morally, legally, and financially responsible for COVID-19.