As the walls are closing in on those who’ve attempted to deflect, discredit, and ignore the evidence over the last 18 months that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a few legacy media organizations are starting to report what we’ve reported for a few months and bringing the receipts – sort of.

As the New York Post reported on June 4 (and which RedState’s Scott Hounsell elaborated on later), a Chinese military scientist named Zhou Yusen filed for a patent for a coronavirus vaccine on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army in February 2020, only five weeks after China finally admitted that COVID-19 could be transmitted from human to human. Zhou, an award-winning military scientist, died in May 2020, but the Chinese government didn’t issue any report on his death and there were no tributes, which one would expect for such a decorated scientist. The only documentation of his death is a brief mention in a July 2020 Chinese media report and a notation of “deceased” next to his name on a research paper published in December 2020.

NBC News is now reporting not about Zhou developing the vaccine for the PLA or about the interesting (to say the least) development timeline, but simply that Zhou and at least one other Chinese military scientist performed coronavirus research with Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Of course, the fact that she was knowingly working with the PLA on coronavirus research is a big deal in and of itself given how vehemently she’s denied that on numerous occasions.

In March, Dr. Shi told former State Department official Jamie Metzl (according to video shown in the NBC News report):

In the beginning of this COVID-19 we heard the rumors that claimed that in our laboratory we have some project, blah blah, with the Army, blah, blah, these kind of rumors, but this is not correct.

Just asked #ShiZhengli if Chinese military was doing classified research @ #Wuhan Inst of Virology. She said "all our research is open & transparent…I don't know of any military work." If @ODNIgov claim to the contrary true, lab leak now the leading #COVID19 origin hypothesis.

— Jamie Metzl (@JamieMetzl) March 23, 2021

But former State Department investigator David Asher, who led the task force investigating the origins of COVID-19 and the role of the Chinese Communist Party, told NBC News’ Keir Simmons:

I’m very confident that the military was funding a secret program that — it did involve coronaviruses. I heard this from several foreign researchers who observed researchers in that lab in military lab coats.

In his report, Simmons said:

Shi and others collaborated with a military scientist on coronavirus research in spring 2018, and with another military scientist, Zhou Yusen, in December 2019. In fall 2020 an article that scientist authored listed him in a footnote as deceased. NBC has been unable to ascertain the circumstances of his death.

What’s interesting about this report is what it doesn’t say. It’s clearly part of an effort to slowly make the general American public, the people who watch things like NBC News, more comfortable with the notion that the coronavirus pandemic originated at a Chinese lab, and that the Chinese military conducted some joint research with the virologists at the WIV. But to what end? Is it because they know that more information is going to be coming out due to Dong Jingwei’s defection and they’re trying to get ahead of it and limit it?

As an aside, one has to wonder what the reaction to this has been among people who have bought the party narrative hook, line, and sinker.

With any type of intelligence or political narrative, one must also look at what pieces are left out of the story and ask why. As noted above, NBC didn’t inform its viewers that Zhou’s name was on a patent application for a coronavirus vaccine filed in February 2020 by the Chinese military.

They also didn’t tell their viewers what type of research Dr. Shi performed with these military scientists. It turns out that the February 2018 research paper, which determined that an outbreak of swine diarrhea was caused by a novel bat coronavirus that crossed species, was funded by the National Institutes of Health and USAID’s PREDICT program. It also turns out that Peter Daszak, the real-life Bond villain, was a co-author.

I believe that the December 2019 paper NBC News refers to is actually this paper titled “Molecular Mechanism for Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of Coronavirus Entry,” which both Dr. Shi and Zhou Yusen contributed to. This work was supported by three NIH grants, which Science magazine says were given to two researchers from US institutions, Dr. Fang Li of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Lanying Du of the New York Blood Center.

And those aren’t the only two instances of US government money going to research done in conjunction with PLA scientists. Stay tuned.

So, as our Scott Hounsell wrote way back on May 13, the United States did knowingly fund coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and now we know that the Chinese military wasn’t just co-existing at the laboratory; they were participating in the research and the United States government was paying for it.

Once again, for emphasis. The United States government was funding gain-of-function research on coronaviruses performed by Chinese military scientists.

If that doesn’t infuriate everyone who reads it, we’re lost as a country.