Amateur sleuths on the Internet are often regular citizens who have enough time on their hands to dig up information and research on cold cases and mysteries. Since the Internet came about, Internet sleuths around the world have created online communities to help solve different kinds of cases. Arguably one of the biggest cases today is the COVID pandemic and the search for is true origins.
Recently, the Wuhan lab leak theory has gained credibility following reports that several Wuhan researchers fell ill with COVID-like symptoms way before the pandemic was even declared. The U.S. has already ordered further investigation into the Wuhan lab leak, an effort that's supported by British intelligence. But that's not all, as amateur sleuths are also on the case to determine just how credible the Wuhan lab leak theory is.
According to Newsweek, what once was a "racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right" is now being considered as a viable theory as to how the coronavirus began.
In the last few weeks, substantial evidence supporting the Wuhan lab leak theory "became too substantial to ignore." The credit for this major change in attitude by the general public goes to DRASTIC, or Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, a group of amateur sleuths who had enough time and curiosity on their hands to search the Internet for clues.
This group is made up of around two dozen individuals from all over the world who combed through the Internet, gathered documents, pieced together information, and presented their research on Twitter as an "open-source, collective brainstorming session that was part forensic science [and] part citizen journalism."
"Without the work done by the DRASTIC team, I don't really know where we would be today with the origins of COVID-19," Alina Chan, a researcher at MIT and Harvard commented on Twitter, as reported by The Blaze. "Because what they have accomplished collectively is not something scientists can do. It's more similar to intelligence gathering."
The work of amateur sleuths helped uncover Wuhan Institute of Virology's involvement in bat coronavirus studies that began in the foraging of bat caves, where miners have been said to have been infected by a virus that is the closest known relative to COVID. Through DRASTIC's work, it was also made known how the Wuhan lab leak may be possible because of their inadequate safety protocols, which the CCP tried to cover up.
The amateur sleuths also uncovered how the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance through its president, biologist Peter Daszak, pushed to "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." In August 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) demanded EcoHealth Alliance for answers on the "apparent disappearance" of a Wuhan lab scientist and information on the Wuhan lab's safety protocols.
Daszak himself proudly admitted that he has a longstanding "collaboration" with the Chinese Communist Party, which reports said to have prevented transparency in their handling of the virus, controlled the progress of investigations into how the pandemic came to be, and tried avoiding taking responsibility for how they handled COVID-19, which first spread in China.
Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, on the other hand, is the non-profit that provided American taxpayer-paid funding to the Wuhan lab for its coronavirus studies.
In uncovered emails from Daszak to infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, the EcoHealth Alliance president thanked the top infectious diseases expert for highlighting that COVID had zoonotic origins and did not come from a Wuhan lab leak.
Investigations led by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, however, found no evidence of the virus as having zoonotic origins.
