What Really Happened in Wuhan

CIS executive director, Tom Switzer sat down for a live in-person discussion with journalist and author Sharri Markson on the Wuhan lab theory and the origins of this global pandemic in the context of a rising and increasingly more assertive China. 

Throughout the past 18-months, the conventional explanation for this pandemic has been that the virus spilt over from animals to humans in the wet markets of Wuhan. Yet, the origins of Covid-19 remain unknown. Anyone who’s questioned this orthodoxy has been treated with shock, censure and derision. It has been, in short, a conspiracy theory to suggest that the virus leaked from a laboratory. 

Yet as the news of an outbreak in Wuhan broke, the Chinese military took control. Gagging laboratory insiders, preventing access to data and even objecting to calls for an international enquiry. All this has led to uncertainty about any role, that the laboratory played in causing COVID-19. Recently, when President Biden ordered intelligence agencies to investigate whether it might have escaped from a Wuhan lab, suddenly the media started taking the theory seriously. Has China’s suppression of information of what happened in Wuhan mean we will never know the outbreak’s origins?  

Walkley Award-winning journalist, Sharri Markson is the Investigations Editor at The Australian and host of prime-time show Sharri on Sky News Australia. Her new book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, is published by HarperCollins.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and a presenter at ABC’s Radio National.