The Lies Were the Point: What the U.S. Pandemic Report Really Reveals

By Sebastian Wang

1. Introduction: A Reckoning Long Overdue

In December 2024, the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final report—a sprawling, 500-page document that claims to expose the truth behind COVID-19. Its findings are damning, its tone confident, and its conclusions, for the most part, persuasive. But one must ask: if this is the official story now, how bad must the real story be? When a government committee—one chaired by Republican partisans and laced with institutional caution—admits that U.S. funding may have helped create the virus, we should not assume this is the whole truth. It may well be the least they could admit without collapsing public trust altogether.

In that light, the report should not be read as an honest reckoning but as an exercise in damage control. It admits only what cannot be denied. It omits or evades anything that implicates the broader establishment—Republican and Democrat, bureaucrat and scientist, corporation and intelligence agency. For every page of exposure, there are three pages of obfuscation. And what it leaves out may be more important than what it contains.

For as time passes and new evidence emerges, it becomes even clearer than it was from the start that the official narrative was a lie. It was not just a distortion or a mistake, but a lie—systematic, strategic, and sustained. And like all lies of state, it served power. It served to enrich pharmaceutical conglomerates, to expand the power of unaccountable bureaucracies, to criminalise dissent, and to cement the rule of a class that sees ordinary people as lab rats.

But even this characterisation accepts too easily the premise that COVID-19 was an unprecedented threat. It now seems clear that, dangerous as the virus was to the elderly and infirm, it never posed the existential danger that governments insisted it did. The fatality rate was grossly overstated, the imagery designed to shock. Field hospitals remained empty. Young people were locked in their homes and masked for years to protect a system that had already failed to protect its most vulnerable. If the virus had emerged in 2005 or 1995, it is doubtful we would have even noticed. What changed was not the virus—it was the state’s capacity and appetite for control.

The Select Subcommittee’s final report claims to expose the mistakes and deceptions of the pandemic response. In some areas, it succeeds. But its tone is curiously muted. It indicts a few individuals—Fauci, Collins, Daszak—but leaves entire institutions untouched. It makes much of bureaucratic incompetence, but little of the extraordinary profitability of lockdowns and mandates. It admits cover-ups but frames them as overreactions, not deliberate strategies.

1. COVID-19 likely came from a lab leak. The report claims that the virus “most likely” emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and cites evidence of genetically manipulated viral strains. Yet it never addresses why a virus with a U.S.-designed spike protein, funded through U.S. intermediaries, and released in a way most harmful to China and Europe, should be considered a mere accident.
2. U.S. funding helped create the virus. Through EcoHealth Alliance, American taxpayers funded Wuhan’s gain-of-function research. The report mentions this in a tone of regret—but not outrage. It does not ask why this arrangement existed, who approved it, or what other such programmes may still be running.
3. The lab leak theory was deliberately suppressed. Here, the report is clearest. It documents how Dr Anthony Fauci and NIH leadership coordinated a scientific PR campaign to brand the lab leak idea a “conspiracy theory.” They knew it was plausible. They lied anyway. But the report avoids asking why they lied. To protect Chinese partners? To protect American funding? To prevent panic? Or because they knew the leak wasn’t accidental at all?
4. Censorship was coordinated and premeditated. The report shows how U.S. agencies colluded with Twitter, Facebook, and Google to suppress dissent. It mentions emails, meetings, and pressure campaigns. What it does not explore is how easily tech companies complied—and what this reveals about who really governs the so-called democratic West.
5. Non-pharmaceutical interventions were largely unscientific. Social distancing rules were invented without basis. Masks were mandated before being tested. Children were treated as disease vectors despite near-zero risk. But the report treats this as bureaucratic panic. It does not consider the possibility that the chaos was intentional—that creating fear and obedience was the goal.
6. Vaccine mandates ignored natural immunity. This is quietly admitted, but not explored. The report does not ask why natural immunity was erased from public discussion, or why data showing vaccine harms was buried. Nor does it ask why vaccine contracts remain secret.
7. Pandemic relief was looted. The fraud was industrial in scale. Half a trillion dollars was wasted. The report gives numbers but avoids naming names. It treats this as carelessness, not class warfare. In truth, it was a transfer of wealth from the working public to the politically connected.
8. No one was punished. Fauci retired on a government pension. Collins moved to academia. Peter Daszak’s NGO continues to operate. The media figures who lied and mocked sceptics still sit behind desks. This, more than anything, reveals the function of the report—not to deliver justice, but to redirect anger.

If America lied, Britain copied its homework. The Hallett Inquiry has already confirmed what many suspected: that the UK’s pandemic plans were hollow, its experts unprepared. Yet even this report tiptoes around the key issue: the British government did not fail; it obeyed.

Obeyed whom? The WHO, the Americans, the pharmaceutical lobby, the behavioural scientists. The civil service moved in lockstep with the global consensus, not pausing to ask whether lockdowns worked, whether vaccines were necessary for the young, or whether closing churches while keeping casinos open made any sense. Public Health England suppressed inconvenient data. Police arrested citizens for walking too far from home. The BBC ran fear campaigns funded by government departments. “Disinformation” became a euphemism for dissent. The elderly died alone. The dying were denied visits. Meanwhile, elites held parties in Downing Street and flew to Caribbean retreats.

The British media, for its part, behaved like an adjunct of the state. Voices of dissent—Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan, and a few brave MPs—were smeared or ignored. Newspapers repeated press releases. Television networks treated public health officials as infallible priests.

The result: a culture of suppression more subtle than China’s, but ultimately more effective. In Britain, unlike in Beijing, people did not fear imprisonment. They feared losing their bank accounts, their jobs, their social standing. As I’ve argued before, the British state does not silence you with tanks. It silences you with HR departments and hate speech laws.

I come now to Ron Unz, editor of The Unz Review—a publication that it will probably soon be illegal in this country to mention, let alone reference. He does not claim to have final proof, but he compiles a compelling mosaic of circumstantial evidence that demands consideration. His central thesis is this: COVID-19 was not a Chinese bioweapon that accidentally escaped, but an American bioweapon deliberately planted in Wuhan to provoke a strategic catastrophe in China. The release may have been botched—perhaps it spread faster than expected or mutated unpredictably—but its original aim was geopolitical.

He begins with timing. The outbreak coincided almost exactly with the Chinese Lunar New Year, a period of unusual domestic travel and economic activity. It struck just as protests in Hong Kong were reaching a crisis point. It immediately forced shutdowns across the Chinese mainland, derailing Belt and Road negotiations, halting infrastructure projects, and delivering a direct hit to supply chains that had positioned China as the indispensable global workshop.

Then there is the issue of location. Why Wuhan? Not just because it houses the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but because the presence of that lab would immediately provide the perfect alibi: a plausible site of an accidental leak. As Unz notes, if one wanted to cause an outbreak that could be blamed on China while sowing chaos within it, this would be the ideal choice.

He also points to a curious overlap between American military activities and the viral timeline. In October 2019, just weeks before the first reported cases, the city hosted the Military World Games, with over 300 American personnel in attendance. Several reportedly fell ill during their stay. No serious investigation has ever been mounted into what they were doing or whether they could have introduced the pathogen.

What followed was a hailstorm of benefits for the U.S. establishment. A frightened population proved highly malleable. The government issued trillions in stimulus, much of it immediately directed to friends of the government. Digital surveillance expanded under the pretext of contact tracing. Vaccine companies made hundreds of billions. And China, which had seemed poised to dominate the coming century, was forced into a humiliating and economically devastating lockdown spiral.

As for the pathogen itself, Unz notes the peculiarity of its genomic structure. The furin cleavage site—a feature not present in closely related viruses—enhances human infectivity. It is also the kind of tweak one would make in a laboratory experiment aimed at studying human transmission. That such a feature would evolve naturally, in precisely the way predicted by gain-of-function research, is statistically improbable.

Unz also points to the silence. If his theory were completely unhinged, it would have been savaged in mainstream media. Instead, it has been ignored—systematically, and by every outlet. This is not refutation. It is avoidance. And it suggests that the establishment would rather leave such questions unanswered than risk their explosive implications.

As a British-born Chinese, I am not blind to the emotional temptation to believe Unz’s theory. It absolves China, at least partially, of blame. It offers an alternative villain, one that many in my community already distrust. But the appeal goes deeper. I believe Unz may be right—not because it lets China off the hook, but because it fits the pattern of Western power: secretive and convinced of its impunity. If America has used bioweapons in the past—and it has—why would it not do so now?

Whether Unz’s theory is entirely correct or not, it opens the only kind of discussion worth having, which is not one that trades in platitudes and finger-pointing, but one that asks: who benefits? Who lied then—and who is lying now?

The Subcommittee report, for all its seeming candour, is a stage-managed performance. It tells just enough truth to appear credible, while steering public anger into safe channels. It blames bureaucrats but not systems, individuals but not ideologies. What it avoids is the most pressing question of all: was the pandemic response a failure, or was it a success on different terms? If the goal was public health, it failed. But if the goal was obedience, profit, and the destruction of local community life, it succeeded brilliantly.

Millions are dead—and, if I do not stress the point, I suspect more from the vaccines than the virus itself. Trillions have been transferred from the public to the few. The average citizen has lost autonomy and privacy. And still, those responsible remain untouched. Indeed, they are already preparing for the next emergency.

We must not let the official narrative harden into permanent history. We must keep asking what happened, why it happened, and who gained. For until we do, the real pandemic—the one of lies, corruption, and control—will never end.