I woke up Monday morning to the strangest of sounds...
It was like a huge gust of air rushing over my house.
Pictures rattled on the wall... China rattled in the cupboards... My dog started barking...
What was this? Some sort of meteorological phenomenon?
No.
It was the sound of millions of Americans gasping all at once as they learned an almost incomprehensible truth.
It was the sound of shock and disbelief.
It was the sound of me being right.
You see, back in May 2020 - just two months after the pandemic upended our entire way of life - I wrote to all of you and spoke very plainly...
"Did the coronavirus come from a lab?" I asked. "The answer to this first question is that nobody knows for sure, but there's considerable evidence to suggest that yes, it did."
I then went on to lay out all of the evidence I had collected to that point.
To wit:
Wuhan is home to two labs. Both were studying coronaviruses, and both had researchers harvesting bats from caves.One of the lab's lead virologists, Shi Zhengli, has spent years fishing around bat caves, earning her the moniker "bat woman." And the other lab, Wuhan CDC, is a short distance from the Wuhan wet market where officials first said the virus emerged.The bats linked to the coronavirus can't naturally be found within 100 miles of Wuhan, but are studied in both labs.Photos and videos showed researchers from both labs collecting samples from bats without wearing protective gear.There was a known shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate a high-containment laboratory.And a peer-reviewed paper published by Chinese scientists on January 24 found that three of the first four cases, including the very first case, had absolutely no link to the Wuhan market.And with that, I concluded: "Did it leak from a Chinese lab? Sure sounds like it."
I know it's not entirely definitive, but that was about as far as I could go, considering I lack the investigative powers of our intelligence community, access to classified government documents, and any connection to the Chinese Communist Party.
I am, after all, just an investment analyst.
And yet somehow, even in that limited capacity, I managed to get hell of a lot further than the mainstream media with all of their access, resources, and credentials.
It seems I even out-sleuthed members of our own intelligence community.
I'd say that's crazy, but it isn't even the first time this has happened.
Because about a month after I wrote that lab leak piece, I wrote another Op-Ed here about inflation.
"In short, the cost of food and basic necessities, and prices in general are actually rising - not contracting," I said. "And that means the dollar is, in fact, getting weaker. Purchasing power is on the decline."
And that was in June 2020, folks.