Wait? What? COVID-19 was really COVID-18? Tell me more!

Documents released by the Senate Homeland Security Committee, led by Sen. Randal H. “Rand” Paul, R.-Ky., show that the Red Chinese were on their coronavirus kick years before their pandemic attack sidelined the American economy and body politics.

Paul said the documents provide a window into Chinese malfeasance and federal awareness of their machinations.

The release of emails and Customs and Border Protection reports was timed to tease and tee up Paul’s explosive hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci, which was its own popcorn moment.

In an April 15, 2020, interview, senior White House staffer Kellyanne Conway said: “This is COVID-1, not COVID-1, folks, and so you would think the people charged with the World Health Organization, facts and figures, would be on top of that.”

Conway was making a pointed joke, but, of course, the “19” in COVID-19 means the disease was discovered in 2019.

Or was it? Should it be called COVID-18?

In April 2018, Dr. Zhengli Shi, the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the director of the Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety of Chinese Academy of Sciences, directed University of Minnesota Professor Fang Li to bring monoclonal antibodies from her lab to China.

Li was working on research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Li told Shi, best-known by her “the Bat Lady” moniker, that it was not a good idea given the tensions between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Instead, she proposed that another scientist could move the antibodies to China.

One of Li’s University of Minnesota students, Qibin Geng, reached out to University of North Carolina Professor Ralph S. Baric. Baric partnered with Shi in 2015 in a project that took the spike proteins found in bat virus and transplanted them onto a mouse virus, so they could better study how to attach the virus into the human airway cells.

So? Um? COVID-2015?

It is unclear whether Baric sent the antibodies to China, but Geng did coordinate the shipment of live swine viruses with instructions as to how to grow the viruses to the professor in October 2018.

Then, in November 2018, the feds caught a courier bringing virus-related spike protein into the United States from China. The courier had three vials wrapped in wax paper and paper towels, and he said the materials were sent by Professor Yusen Zho, the Academy of Military Medical Sciences of the PLA–and they were intended for Li.

The Agriculture Department granted Li a permit from January 2014 to January 2015 for bat virus research, but that expired permit did not allow for the import or export of materials.

COVID-14?!? How long was this going on?

With all these viruses and antibodies flying around, it is also illuminating that Zho is the husband of Lanyin Du. Du is a professor at the Georgia State University Institute for Biomedical Sciences, but then she was the leader of the Viral Immunology Laboratory at the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute, located at the New York Blood Center.

It is good she landed on her feet.

In June 2021, as the pandemic seemed to be raging forever, the same courier was stopped with not three, but 132 vials with unique flies used to create organism models in the laboratory. The courier also had a laptop issued by a federal government research facility to another individual–but, the courier has the log on credentials.

There is so much talk of moving on some things, like the origins of COVID-19 or the 2020 Presidential Election, but nobody says we have to move on from J6 or the death of George Floyd.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a disease that attacked human airways, but also our economy, our civil society and the Constitution.

If nobody is going to jail, we should at least find out who did what.