Walter Ian Lipkin AKA the “virus hunter” is a professor of epidemiology at Colombia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.
Epidemiology is a branch of medicine that deals with the distribution, incidence, and control of disease among a defined population. As you can imagine, epidemiology plays an important role in public health and experts are often called on by policymakers to help make informed decisions including the identification of risk factors for disease.
On May 5th, 2020 Professor Lipkin sent Dr. Anthony Fauci (America’s top COVID expert) an email thanking him for his “efforts in steering and messaging.” The previous day, Fauci had told National Geographic that he was “very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.”
Fauci also received thanks from Peter Daszak, whose nonprofit organization EcoHealth Alliance awarded $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study coronaviruses in bats. The organization has also funneled more than $1 million to the graduate program for which Lipkin works.
Included in Lipkin’s May 5th email to Dr. Fauci was a message forwarded from Chen Zhu, a former Chinese Health Minister currently serving as Vice Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China as well as president of the Red Cross Society of China.
Chen’s boss at the NPC is Li Zhanshu, a prominent member of the CCP and an adviser to President Xi Jinping. His boss at the Red Cross is Wang Qishan, another member of the CCP who assists the Chinese president on foreign policy.
Lipkin worked directly with Chen during the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak as an intermediary between the Chinese government and the World Health Organization.
In 2016, he was awarded the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award from President Xi Jinping – one of the highest awards China grants to foreign scientists.
In January 2020, Lipkin traveled to China to study the coronavirus outbreak. He publicly dismissed the lab-leak theory as early as February, telling reporters that his team had found “no evidence for that whatsoever” and praised Beijing’s transparency during the early months of the pandemic despite proof of the opposite.
Not surprisingly, Lipkin was awarded another medal from the Chinese government in January 2021.
This week, Dr. Fauci said that he never “deliberately suppressed” the lab-leak theory and had always kept an “open mind” regarding the origin of the virus.
Author’s Note: As evidence supporting the lab-leak theory continues to grow, officials including Dr. Fauci, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and President Joe Biden have called for a renewed investigation into the possibility that COVID escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, China.
