Pandemonium

DRASTIC and Chan & Ridley fabricated a narrative about eight virus sequences from the Mojiang mine.

(TL;DR: No.)

In a recent Opinion piece in The Guardian, David Relman discusses the origin of COVID-19 in the context of the Fauci hearing before Rand Paul’s committee.

In 2021, leakers tried, and failed, to reproduce a table of identities between SARS-like coronaviruses that was presented in a 2019 MSc thesis from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

There is no evidence for a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2, so commenters default to meta-discourse and accuse scientists of coverups, for which there is no evidence either.

On 18 June 2026, just before she left her position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard released a set of documents on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2020, Steven Quay, aka DrQuayTM, has been publishing documents claiming to have found damning evidence for a lab leak origin of COVID-19.

In mid-May 2026, Senator Rand Paul held a hearing at the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC), titled “Whistleblower Testimony on the COVID Coverup”.

This is the story of a coincidence: some lab leakers managed to make sequence data of pangolin viruses public again the same day that Jesse Bloom was submitting a preprint highlighting their absence.

This post is the third and final part of my debunk of Matt Ridley’s inaugural Scientific Freedom Lecture at NIH.