 "‘Millions could’ve been saved if Chinese were transparent’: The Seeker, Indian whistleblower, who exposed Covid-19 cover-up")
If not for the investigative work of the likes of Prasenjit Ray, better known as ‘The Seeker’ on X, the world would have never known that a SARS-like virus killed mine workers in China’s Yunnan province in 2012 and a virus from that mine was a near-match for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ray and others at the collective ‘DRASTIC’, short for ‘Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19’, spent months scouring the internet for evidence and analysing it to answer questions that the Chinese regime should have addressed at the onset: What is this virus? Where did this come from?
If the Chinese would have been transparent, millions of people could have been saved, said Ray in an interview with Firstpost’s Madhur Sharma.
What Ray and DRASTIC found was this: In 2012, six mine workers fell sick in China’s Yunnan. They fell sick from a SARS-like virus and developed symptoms similar to Covid-19. Chinese scientists, including those from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), made several trips to collect hundreds of samples from the mine and one of those samples had a virus that matched 96.2 per cent with SARS-CoV-2. If hiding this was not damning enough, it also emerged that WIV had renamed the sample in its databases to confuse anyone looking for it.
Five years later, Ray said the world still has not learnt lessons from the pandemic.
“There’s no clear mechanism in place for transparency or quick sharing of crucial pandemic data like human cases, pathogen sequences, and outbreak origins. We still lack a comprehensive system to report biological incidents. There are no international rules against risky pathogen research,” said Ray.
The edited excerpts from the interview:
Five years later, we know that Chinese scientists had the closest-known ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 with them and had hotwired viruses right up to 2019. We are also aware of the DEFUSE proposal under which Wuhan-based scientists and their US collaborators sought to insert furin-cleavage sites into coronaviruses. Do you believe the DEFUSE proposal is the ‘smoking gun’ evidence that we are looking for regarding the origin?
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIn the past five years later, no bat, pangolin, or civet has been shown to have caused the outbreak in Wuhan, but we do know of the long trail of gain-of-function (GoF) research and cover-ups. Are you confident enough to say that unless the zoonosis proponents present evidence of a bat or pangolin having caused the outbreak beyond a reasonable degree of doubt, we may conclude that a lab-leak caused the Covid-19 outbreak?
I see DEFUSE as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the origin of SARS-CoV-2. It sheds a great deal of light about their research intentions leading up to the pandemic, and it goes beyond just the furin cleavage site (FCS) — the entire genome of SARS-CoV-2 aligns with what was outlined in DEFUSE. Almost every feature of the virus, from the spike protein to the FCS and the insertion of restriction sites, matches with what was outlined in the DEFUSE proposal.
Importantly, any viruses developed under DEFUSE protocols would have been ready by the time Covid-19 emerged, which also helps explain the timing of the outbreak.
Some might argue that the DEFUSE project was never funded and therefore never implemented. However, much of the research was planned to take place at the WIV, utilising their own proprietary data and samples.
They had all the necessary expertise, resources, and funding in place.
For example, in January 2018, Shi Zhengli was awarded nearly $1.5 million by Chinese funding agencies — more than the $1.2 million Peter Daszak requested from DARPA for WIV’s involvement in DEFUSE.
Plus, if you look at some of the theses published by WIV before the pandemic, you can see that key elements of the DEFUSE proposal had already been carried out.
In short, I believe DEFUSE not only explains the virus’ origin and its unique genomic features but also its timing. It’s about as close to a smoking gun as we’re likely to get.
For the benefit of the readers, please tell us why Chinese efforts to hide the connection to RaTG13 and the Mojiang miners’ incident are so damning.
Moreover, when seen in light of revelations around the DEFUSE proposal, do you believe we now have a roadmap of the outbreak —Mojiang incident leading to viral collection, followed by GoF research in Wuhan, and then DEFUSE proposal not long before Covid-19 outbreak— in sight that makes for a strong circumstantial case indicting the Wuhan lab?
The Mojiang miners incident was likely the first known case of a SARS-like virus jumping directly into humans, causing severe respiratory illness, and leading to hospitalisations.
Their clinical, radiological, and serological findings strongly suggest a SARS-like virus as the culprit.
At least two miners tested positive for IgM, indicating recent viral incident, and four miners tested showed SARS-like antibodies in their blood tests. Notably, the mine was known to harbour bats that can carry SARS-like viruses, and a close cousin of SARS-CoV-2 was found in the same mine.
WIV was specifically tasked to investigate this incident, and they did, as evidenced by some obscure research theses.
Thousands of bat samples were collected from the mine and transported to Wuhan for further study.
Their research efforts seem to have ramped up after 2018, coinciding with advancements in next-generation sequencing and synthetic virology, and right around the time the DEFUSE proposal was being drafted.
Given all that, it stands to reason that WIV would have thoroughly pursued the Mojiang cases.
Yet, they failed to disclose key details about the mine and the miners’ illness or report it to health authorities like the World Health Organization (WHO).
Interestingly, out of all the bat caves and mines in China, only the Mojiang mine investigation prompted a response from Chinese authorities.
Access to the mine has been restricted, and researchers who tried to investigate had their samples confiscated.
This secrecy and lack of transparency raises an important question: what are they trying to hide if not a closer relative or even a precursor to SARS-CoV-2?
What is the importance of knowing conclusively about the origin of Covid-19 pandemic? Is it just the question of accountability here or the search of answers or is there something bigger at stake here?
Imagine a plane crash with around 20 million people on board. After months and years of searching for the black box to figure out what happened, you find out that someone has it but refuses to share it. Even worse, they insist that the cause is already settled and they deny any human error could be involved. That’s pretty much what we’re dealing with regarding the origins of Covid-19.
When it comes to accountability, WIV clearly ignored biosafety protocols and put global security at risk. Meanwhile, EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of their National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, and US authorities failed to oversee the risky research they funded.
From the very beginning, vested interests manipulated and misrepresented the facts surrounding Covid origins. Prominent scientists failed to disclose their conflicts of interest, and often held private views that were completely different from what they said publicly. Issues of scientific misconduct in major journals still haven’t been addressed even after publication.
This was made worse by media outlets, and fact-checkers who failed in their responsibility to question, investigate, and publish without bias. By gatekeeping and prematurely dismissing the lab-origin theory, they severely damaged trust in both journalism and science.
Despite some progress, like bans on federal funding for EHA and WIV, meaningful accountability is still absent. No one has truly faced the consequences for their failures.
I believe that genuine accountability won’t happen unless circumstances or legal actions force it.
You have been among the most leading figures when it comes to unearthing information related to Covid-19 outbreak and Chinese viral research. What pushed you into looking into Chinese databases in 2020 and what was the moment when you realised that the world was being misled by the prevalent Covid-19 discourse? Did you start as a skeptic or did you suspect lab-leak from the onset?
Back then, wet market origin was the widely held consensus in the media. I initially believed wholeheartedly in what the media was reporting. In fact, my very first public comment on the pandemic back in March 2020 was: ‘Nobody wants to see their parents or grandparents die over a stupid virus from an exotic animal market.’
I didn’t consciously set out to find Covid-19 origins, but I kind of got drawn into this. Like most people, at the beginning, I assumed it started from the wet market, but by April 2020, as I began to dig deeper, inconsistencies in the wet market narrative started to emerge.
The deeper I looked, the more compelled I felt to keep digging further. This curiosity drove me to immerse myself in primary literature and engage in discussions on Twitter with a diverse, global community of curious minds. This group organically evolved into DRASTIC, out of a shared desire to explore the overlooked possibility of a lab origin, and a commitment to uncovering the truth.
I was motivated by a genuine curiosity, and a belief in ‘don’t trust, verify’, and I began digging into Chinese journals, tenders, scientific databases, and any available data to understand what really happened.
Like any investigative journey, you want to know everything, before ruling it out.
Since then, I’ve dedicated countless hours seeking primary source documents and analysing the beliefs and the evidence surrounding this theory. In the last five years, we have uncovered never-seen-before documents detailing what was happening in Wuhan and made them publicly accessible.
For a long time, the mainstream media overlooked our findings. But eventually, our investigations compelled even the highest levels of the US government, and figures like Dr. Fauci, to take notice.
Had China been completely transparent regarding the coronavirus outbreak, such as sharing relevant information from databases and making the genome public at once, do you believe the world could have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic much better?
I think in the crucial first few weeks and months, if Chinese scientists and authorities had been transparent, millions of lives could have been saved. Instead, we saw delays, denials, and a systematic effort to withhold data.
I believe it’s important that we hold them accountable. Deceiving the world should have consequences.
As a ‘mystery disease’ is spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), some publications have already started writing stories about ‘Disease X’ — a pandemic waiting to happen at some point in the future. With the knowledge of how the world responded to Covid-19 pandemic, how well-placed the world is to deal with another pandemic? Do you believe the correct lessons have been learnt — and what lessons need to be learnt if not?
I fear that we’re still very far from where we need to be. There’s no clear mechanism in place for transparency or quick sharing of crucial pandemic data like human cases, pathogen sequences, and outbreak origins. We still lack a comprehensive system to report biological incidents. There are no international rules against risky pathogen research.
The only silver lining is that the public awareness of the dangers associated with lab manipulation of pathogens has grown. People’s perceptions of the risks related to lab accidents have shifted.
But has funding for risky science become more transparent or accountable to the public it’s meant to serve? I don’t think so.
Overall, I believe we need a new approach to funding science, one that prioritises transparency, accountability, and strict norms and biosafety standards, especially when it comes to potentially dangerous research on pandemic pathogens.
We also need to rethink the reward structure for scientific publishing practices.
Do you believe the trust in science and scientists has fallen considerably since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic?
In the past five years, we have seen how not just Chinese scientists but Western scientists misled the public about the reality of the outbreak. Even as they privately suspected a lab-accident or lab-engineering, they publicly pushed for the natural-origin narrative. Moreover, the public guidance issued by scientists —and the way the WHO parroted the Chinese regime’s narrative— has made people question if the experts know any better than the average person on the street.
Do you believe scientists and institutions like the WHO have lost the stature they once had?
Looking back, it’s pretty clear that some senior figures in the western scientific establishment misled the public while wielding their authority as a weapon to do so.
Those who were expected to uphold honesty, transparency, and accountability betrayed that trust and let us down. Some of them publicly promoted one version of ’the science’ while privately believing something very different. This seriously damaged public trust in scientific institutions, and triggered a health and authority crisis that still reverberates today, and will likely resonate for years to come
Just to be clear, I’m not doubting science or the scientific process itself, but questioning the trust we placed in those who claim to speak for it.
Now that the messy reality is out in the open, I think we’re seeing a shift in the balance of power. Many people now feel disconnected from the so-called ‘expert’ community, especially in virology. The legacy media, government agencies, and the scientific establishment are no longer the gatekeepers of information.
In many ways, I think that’s a good thing — it has sparked a broader, more democratic conversation about science and public policy.
I hope the scientific community will eventually come to terms with how trust was broken and why the integrity of the scientific process was undermined. But for the scientific community to rebuild public trust, they’ll need to reflect on where things went wrong and commit to real accountability and transparency.
How do you see the consistent advocacy by certain quarters for the GoF research? Do you believe there are real benefits of such research if done adequately or that the risks far outweigh any potential benefits?
Gain-of-function (GoF) research has always been contentious, but, until very recently, the debate was confined to select scientific circles. Now, we’re finally seeing a serious public reckoning.
The reality is that the potential benefits of GoF research are marginal at best, while the risks are catastrophic. To me, these dangerous virology experiments are not just scientifically questionable — they’re ethically indefensible. The risk-reward balance simply doesn’t hold up.
What’s troubling is that many of those downplaying the risks are the same people who funded or conducted this research. Even more concerning, the public —who bear the greatest risks— has been excluded from the conversation.
You can’t expose humanity to pandemic threats while keeping people in the dark. The stakes are just too high. Even within the scientific community, some still fail to grasp the full scale of the risks involved.
In this field, profits are private, but the risks are public — and that’s fundamentally unjust and unethical. When potential harms far outweigh speculative benefits, continuing this type of research becomes indefensible.
What makes matters worse is the insular, self-serving nature of the GoF research community. A small group of scientists has effectively controlled the narrative, driven by personal interests and professional solidarity.
I believe GoF research should be banned globally — or at the very least, placed under a strict international moratorium with safeguards comparable to those regulating nuclear weapons.
This means requiring global approvals for all high-risk pathogen research, enforcing full transparency, conducting regular inspections, maintaining mandatory audit trails, and shutting down labs that fail to meet strict safety and transparency standards.
So far, however, the world’s response has been one of denial — ignoring the risks and hoping for the best. That’s a gamble we simply can’t afford.
Five years after the Covid-19 outbreak, during which any talk of a potential lab accident was deemed a conspiracy theory for nearly a year, do you believe that the longstanding narrative around science being apolitical and nonpartisan is over? We saw US scientists effectively becoming mouthpieces of China along with the WHO and several people avoided speaking about the potential lab accident just because of political concerns. Do you believe science and scientists have to be scrutinised the same way you would scrutinise any other profession in the post-Covid world, such as a journalist, teacher, or a lawyer?
Science and journalism thrive on openness and debate, but from the outset, a small group of scientists seemed determined on controlling the narrative around Covid-19 origins. They even admitted privately that non-scientific factors —political pressures, fears of embarrassing China, and concerns about their own field— influenced how they framed the virus’s origins.
Ironically, in trying to shield science from blame, they ended up undermining its credibility — perhaps unwittingly pushing even more people toward considering a lab origin.
The very efforts meant to ‘protect’ science fractured public trust in it.
On the bright side, the impact of the pandemic has gone far beyond just scientific discussions — it’s now a matter of biosecurity, geopolitics, and economics. Legitimate scientific disagreements can no longer be silenced as easily. Decisions about risky research can’t be left to scientists alone anymore. A global dialogue on regulation, transparency, and accountability has finally begun, and that was long overdue.
We are weeks away from a new administration in the United States, which has said on the record that they are convinced of the lab-origin of Covid-19. Since it is unlikely that Chinese will ever admit that the virus indeed came from a lab, do you believe the ‘conclusive’ answer can only come from the United States once all internal records are made public?
While many questions about Covid-19’s origin remain unanswered, we have a fairly clear picture of the type of research happening in Wuhan — statistically, and from an evidentiary standpoint, it seems far more likely that this research triggered the pandemic.
The final pieces of the puzzle are probably buried in lab notebooks, research grants, and internal records in China. Until those are made public, drawing definitive conclusions is impossible. But in a totalitarian state, expecting transparency or an honest accounting from those involved seems unrealistic.
However, the US played a role by outsourcing some of this risky research to Wuhan, leaving behind an electronic trail of communications between American and Chinese researchers. There are individuals in the US who likely know much more. Subpoenas and access to communication records could reveal critical information.
It is encouraging to see that some key figures in the new US administration seem committed to holding people accountable. I hope they make this a priority.
I genuinely believe that sooner or later, the full truth will come to light.
 "Russian drones over Poland: Trump’s tepid reaction a wake-up call for Nato?")
 "As Russia pushes east, Ukraine faces mounting pressure to defend its heartland")
 "Why Mossad was not on board with Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar")
 "Turkey: Erdogan's police arrest opposition mayor Hasan Mutlu, dozens officials in corruption probe")
 "Russian drones over Poland: Trump’s tepid reaction a wake-up call for Nato?")
 "As Russia pushes east, Ukraine faces mounting pressure to defend its heartland")
 "Why Mossad was not on board with Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar")
 "Turkey: Erdogan's police arrest opposition mayor Hasan Mutlu, dozens officials in corruption probe")
