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What Really Happened In Wuhan

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What Really Happened In Wuhan

By: Sharri Markson
Narrated by: Danielle Carter
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About this listen

Walkley Award-winning journalist, Sharri Markson is the Investigations Editor at The Australian and host of prime-time show Sharri on Sky News Australia.


The origins of Covid-19 are shrouded in mystery. Scientists and government officials insisted, for a year and a half, that the virus had a natural origin, ridiculing anyone who dared contradict this view. Tech giants swept the internet, censoring and silencing debate in the most extreme fashion. Yet it is undeniable that a secretive facility in Wuhan was immersed in genetically manipulating bat-coronaviruses in perilous experiments. And as soon as the news of an outbreak in Wuhan leaked, the Chinese military took control and gagged all laboratory insiders.

Part-thriller, part-expose, What Really Happened in Wuhan is a ground-breaking investigation from leading journalist Sharri Markson into the origins of Covid-19, the cover-ups, the conspiracies and the classified research. It features never-before-seen primary documents exposing China's concealment of the virus, fresh interviews with whistleblower doctors in Wuhan and crucial eyewitness accounts that dismantle what we thought we knew about when the outbreak hit.

With unprecedented access to Washington insiders, Markson takes you inside the White House, with senior Trump lieutenants revealing first-hand accounts of fiery Oval Office clashes and new stories of compromised government advisors and censored scientists.

Bravely reported and chillingly laid out, Markson brings to light the stories of the pandemic from the people on the ground: the scientists and national security officials who raised uncomfortable truths and were labelled conspiracy theorists, until government agencies began to suspect they might have been right all along. These brave individuals persisted through bruising battles and played a crucial role in investigating the origins of Covid-19 to finally, in this book, bring us closer to the truth of what really happened in Wuhan.

Asia Contagious Diseases Media Studies Physical Illness & Disease Politics & Government Social Sciences China Government Fiction

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All stars
Most relevant
I enjoyed this book enormously. I alternated between the horror and enraged feeling toward those potentially responsible.
The book was well presented throughout and had good narrative. Points were well argued and persuasive.
The middle is slightly technical in how virus operate but still informed the lay reader.
Toward the end I did feel a little repetition but it nicely summed up the case against a natural source for the virus.

Fascinating & Enraging

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A really fascinating account unpicking the origins of COVID 19. Rich in detail it leads one to conclude that it is much more likely than not that the virus escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.

Many of the actors in this appalling tragedy do not come out well. It is apparent that the US funding of the highly risky "gain of function" work to engineer viruses to make them more pathogenic, and/or infectious to humans, gave them a very strong incentive to "rubbish" the theory that the virus could have escaped from a laboratory. At the time the US felt that this work was better done in China than closer to home, as if , in a global economy, this would make it safer for the US - the ill-fated decision did make a difference, the pandemic is almost certainly far worse and prolonged than it would have been had it originated from a lab escape in the US.

The social media still have questions to answer for their stance with Facebook, in particular, censoring any suggestion that the virus was not a natural zoonotic infection.

Researchers had conflicts of interest, as did the WHO, and when prestigious , supposedly impartial journals like the Lancet, publish opinionated, scientifically specious letters from those with strong conflicting interests then trust in the scientific method and scientists, suffers.

Despite the group think and propaganda that the laboratory origin possibility is just a right wing conspiracy theory it is interesting that the vast majority of reviews of this book are very positive (92% are 4 or 5 star on 25 Oct 21). As is often the case, people are better informed and more intelligent than those in positions of power give them credit for.

In the UK the Government are still looking to China for a major role in both new nuclear build and in telecommunications, hopefully, this book will make the continuing re-assessment of their role more searching.

For me, one of the most poignant parts is in the acknowledgements where Sharri Markson says "As is the case for millions of families, the question of how the virus started is personal, with Max's mum Stella, my grandmother, passing away from COVID 19 in January 2021 while in a UK Nursing Home that didn't provide her with access to a doctor, a hospital or even fluids. She was, effectively, left to fend for herself without adequate medical care in a first world country"

The NHS and Care services in the UK continue to struggle.

Investigative journalism at its best and bravest.

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Have listened to many independent sources over the last couple of years and can vouch for half of what was mentioned in this book. I personally contracted a virus around Guy Fawkes day 2019 as a frontline worker outside London and never again threw the whole of the pandemic seeing thousands per hour working near a transport hub.

Media collection and independent people

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Thank you to Sharri Markson, well done ! A true hero for your amazing investigation work
you can make your own minds up after reading this book.
I'm buying a hazmat suit !

A must read

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An astonishing story detailing minute by minute the tragic confusion and failure of global public health authorities and governments to stop the spread of COVID-19. But beyond this, the book is a comprehensive investigation of the even darker story of deliberate cover-up in China and the substantial circumstantial evidence that the outbreak originated in some way from the activities of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or other Wuhan laboratories that collected and experimented on bat coronaviruses. The coincidence of Covid-19 originating in Wuhan, a major world centre for bat coronavirus research, has always seemed difficult to explain away and this book provides details of the scientific evidence and the many risky activities that could have led to the pandemic, while remaining balanced in its conclusions. But until we see evidence of direct transmission of the virus from an animal host, not forthcoming so far, an accidental laboratory-related leak seems the most likely cause of the disaster that has caused misery to so many.

Everyone should read this

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