The inquiries now examining COVID-19 vaccine injuries are necessary. People who believe they were harmed deserve to be heard, adverse events deserve rigorous investigation, and regulators should be required to explain what they knew, when they knew it and how they reached their decisions.

But there is a danger in allowing the story to end there.

My concern is that the public may finally receive some acknowledgement that mistakes were made in vaccine policy, regulation or injury compensation and then collectively decide that the COVID chapter has been closed. A few officials may apologize. Procedures may be revised. Compensation schemes may be expanded. Politicians may promise that lessons have been learned.

And the much larger question will quietly disappear:

What system of international biological research, government funding, intelligence involvement, regulatory oversight and scientific collaboration existed before the pandemic, and what role, if any, did it play in creating the conditions from which COVID-19 emerged?

That question is considerably more difficult than arguing about vaccines.

It crosses national borders. It involves civilian scientists, military agencies, universities, government laboratories, private contractors and organizations whose relationships are rarely examined together. Each individual connection can look insignificant. It is only when the pieces are placed beside one another that uncomfortable questions emerge.

That is precisely why a narrow vaccine inquiry, important though it may be, cannot substitute for a broader investigation.

The question of COVID’s origin is still not settled

One of the strangest features of the pandemic debate was how quickly discussion of a possible laboratory accident became socially unacceptable, despite the existence of major coronavirus research programs in Wuhan.

That position is no longer sustainable.

In June 2025, the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens concluded that the weight of the scientific evidence available to it favoured zoonotic spillover. But that was not the end of its conclusion. The WHO simultaneously stated that a laboratory accident could not be excluded because crucial information had never been supplied.

China had still not provided the WHO with hundreds of early SARS-CoV-2 sequences, detailed information about animals sold in Wuhan, or the requested records concerning work and biosafety conditions at Wuhan laboratories. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus therefore said that all hypotheses, including zoonotic spillover and a laboratory-related event, had to remain on the table.

That distinction matters.

An unresolved question is not proof of a laboratory accident. But neither is it permission to stop investigating one.

Dr. Mike Ryan of the WHO has also publicly acknowledged one of the structural weaknesses facing the organization: the WHO cannot simply compel a sovereign member state to surrender information. When asked in 2021 how the organization could force China to provide additional information about COVID’s origins, Ryan answered that WHO did not possess such powers.

That is an important institutional limitation. An organization can coordinate international public health while simultaneously lacking the authority necessary to obtain evidence from a government that does not wish to provide it.

The real lesson is therefore larger than China. If countries around the world are going to conduct research involving potentially pandemic pathogens, what international mechanism exists to investigate an accident when the state involved refuses access?

At present, the answer is not reassuring.

Then there is Winnipeg

Canadians should be particularly reluctant to dismiss concerns about international pathogen research because Canada has already experienced a disturbing laboratory-security episode of its own.

Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng worked at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, the country’s only Biosafety Level 4 facility. They were removed from the laboratory in July 2019 and were eventually fired.

For years, Canadians were given very little information about what had happened.

When hundreds of pages of previously classified documents were eventually released, the picture became considerably more serious. Parliamentary records show that investigations raised concerns about undisclosed relationships with Chinese institutions, unauthorized sharing of information and significant failures in laboratory security. CSIS eventually assessed Qiu as potentially presenting a threat to Canada’s national security.

Another fact is equally important.

On March 31, 2019, Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory shipped live Ebola and Henipah virus samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The shipment travelled commercially through Toronto and Beijing. Canadian officials have maintained that the transfer was authorized and complied with the applicable biosafety rules. The parliamentary investigation also states that Qiu was the main interlocutor with the Wuhan institute concerning the transfer.

Those facts do not establish that the Winnipeg episode had anything to do with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

That distinction must be maintained.

But they do establish something else that matters greatly: the international movement of dangerous pathogens between high-containment laboratories is not a fantasy invented during the pandemic. It is part of the modern scientific system.

The 2019 Winnipeg shipment became internationally relevant enough that Dr. Steven Quay specifically discussed it during his June 18, 2024 testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs during its examination of COVID’s origins.

Again, none of this proves that SARS-CoV-2 came from Winnipeg, Wuhan or any laboratory.

It demonstrates why the public deserves a much clearer map of the international research network.

Which laboratories exchanged pathogens?

Which scientists collaborated?

Who financed the projects?

Who approved the transfers?

What research was being performed?

What safety standards applied?

And what happened when national-security objectives and public-health research overlapped?

Those questions should not depend on whether a Liberal, Conservative, Republican, Democrat or any other political party happens to be in government.

High-risk research is international

One mistake in discussing COVID origins is reducing everything to a simple contest between the United States and China.

Modern biological research does not operate so neatly.

Governments finance universities. Universities collaborate internationally. Researchers move between institutions. Public-health agencies work with military agencies. Private organizations administer grants. Samples cross borders. Intelligence agencies invest in emerging technologies. Scientists may participate simultaneously in civilian, academic and government-funded projects.

The result is a research ecosystem in which responsibility can become remarkably difficult to trace.

The controversy surrounding EcoHealth Alliance illustrates the point.

EcoHealth Alliance received U.S. government funding for work involving bat coronaviruses and collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Separately, a 2018 proposal known as DEFUSE was submitted to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. The proposal involved EcoHealth Alliance and collaborators and contemplated sophisticated work on bat coronaviruses.

DARPA did not fund that proposal.

But the proposal itself became significant during subsequent debates over what kinds of coronavirus experiments researchers were contemplating before the pandemic.

Major Joseph Murphy, a U.S. Marine Corps officer, later alleged that DARPA had concealed its involvement with the EcoHealth proposal after he discovered documents on a DARPA network. A subsequently released Department of Defense investigation confirms that Murphy made the allegation and that the documents existed; that does not, by itself, establish every conclusion Murphy drew from them.

This distinction between documents and interpretation is essential.

Too much COVID discussion has suffered from two opposite errors. One side treats every suspicious document as proof of a conspiracy. The other treats every inconvenient document as irrelevant because it does not, by itself, prove the entire case.

Serious investigation requires something between those extremes.

Documents reveal networks, intentions, capabilities and relationships. They are pieces of evidence. Their significance has to be tested against other evidence rather than either sensationalized or ignored.

Ukraine illustrates the same communications problem

The controversy over biological laboratories in Ukraine provides another example of how poor government communication fuels distrust.

In March 2022, U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland testified that Ukraine had “biological research facilities” and that the United States was concerned Russian forces might obtain research materials stored in them.

That statement was immediately interpreted by some as an admission that the United States was operating secret biological-weapons laboratories.

The available evidence does not establish that.

The United States had openly supported Ukrainian biological-security programs for years through the Department of Defense Cooperative Threat Reduction program. Congressional Research Service documentation describes work involving pathogen security, laboratory upgrades, disease surveillance and efforts to secure remnants of the former Soviet biological-weapons infrastructure.

The distinction between a biological research laboratory and a biological-weapons laboratory is enormous.

But there is another lesson here that governments repeatedly fail to understand.

When officials initially communicate as though the existence of sensitive biological facilities is itself absurd, only for the public later to learn that such facilities do exist and contain dangerous pathogens, trust collapses. People reasonably begin asking what else was hidden behind careful terminology.

Transparency at the beginning would eliminate much of that suspicion.

The vaccine manufacturing question deserves the same precision

The same principle applies to the controversy surrounding residual DNA in mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

Some claims circulating online are inaccurate.

The Pfizer vaccine was not manufactured using the infectious SV40 virus in the way that statement is sometimes understood.

The manufacturing process uses plasmid DNA as a template from which vaccine mRNA is produced. Afterward, manufacturers use purification processes, including DNase treatment, to break down and remove residual template DNA. Small amounts of residual DNA can remain, which is why regulators establish limits and testing requirements.

The Pfizer production plasmid contains a regulatory DNA element derived from SV40, including a promoter-enhancer sequence. That is not equivalent to the complete SV40 virus, nor does it contain the SV40 large T-antigen gene most strongly associated with the virus’s tumour-producing properties.

That correction is important because exaggerating the claim only makes legitimate questions easier to dismiss.

The legitimate question is different:

How much residual plasmid DNA is present in finished vaccine doses, how should it be measured, and does delivery inside lipid nanoparticles alter the relevance of existing regulatory limits?

Kevin McKernan and other researchers raised precisely that issue.

McKernan, David Speicher and Jessica Rose subsequently published a peer-reviewed study in Autoimmunity in 2025 examining 32 Pfizer and Moderna vaccine vials representing 16 lots. Their results depended heavily on the measurement method. Fluorometry produced total-DNA estimates greatly exceeding conventional regulatory limits, while qPCR produced much lower measurements. Under the study’s qPCR measurements, Moderna samples remained within the regulatory threshold, while several Pfizer samples exceeded it for the SV40 promoter-enhancer-origin region.

Those findings deserve replication and serious scrutiny.

They do not establish that vaccination causes genomic integration or cancer.

Regulators including the FDA and EMA maintain that validated manufacturing tests show residual DNA below approved limits and say surveillance has not demonstrated health problems attributable to residual plasmid DNA. The FDA has specifically argued that integration into human chromosomes is biologically implausible under the circumstances and that available evidence has not demonstrated genotoxicity.

That disagreement should be investigated scientifically rather than resolved through slogans.

What did Health Canada know?

The Canadian regulatory record makes this issue particularly worthy of examination.

Health Canada’s own parliamentary responses confirm that the agency examined the SV40 promoter-enhancer sequence in 2023 and requested additional information from Pfizer. Health Canada says Pfizer answered its questions and continues to maintain that the residual sequence does not pose an identified safety risk.

But parliamentary records also document internal discussions among Health Canada, the European Medicines Agency and the FDA about the SV40 sequence and allegations of elevated residual DNA.

One October 2023 EMA communication quoted in a Canadian parliamentary question stated that European regulators intended to discuss both the SV40 issue and claims of high DNA levels with Pfizer-BioNTech and asked Health Canada what action it had taken. Another Health Canada communication referred to working with international regulators toward harmonizing removal of certain sequence elements from future plasmids.

None of that proves that regulators discovered a catastrophic safety problem.

But it destroys the argument that there was nothing worth asking about.

There plainly was a regulatory discussion.

The appropriate public questions are therefore straightforward.

When did regulators first become aware of the full plasmid sequence?

What information had manufacturers originally supplied?

Which analytical method was used to measure residual DNA?

Did regulators independently test commercial vaccine lots?

Were manufacturing processes used for mass production materially different from those used to manufacture clinical-trial material?

How were theoretical integration risks assessed in the context of lipid-nanoparticle delivery?

Why were regulators discussing removal of unnecessary sequence elements if those elements were considered completely irrelevant?

And most importantly, why did the public hear so little about this debate while regulators were discussing it among themselves?

These questions can be asked without claiming that residual DNA has been proven to cause disease.

Indeed, asking them carefully is more powerful than making claims the existing evidence cannot support.

Regulatory independence matters as much as the final answer

One of the most troubling aspects of the pandemic was not necessarily that regulators consulted manufacturers. Regulatory agencies must communicate with manufacturers constantly. They cannot evaluate a complex pharmaceutical product without asking technical questions of the company that developed it.

The problem arises when that communication substitutes for independent verification.

If an independent laboratory reports a potential manufacturing problem, regulators should not simply ask the manufacturer whether it considers the finding dangerous.

They should reproduce the experiment.

They should obtain unopened lots from different jurisdictions.

They should specify which assay is appropriate and why.

They should publish the methodology.

They should allow independent laboratories to challenge the result.

And they should release enough of the underlying regulatory evidence that scientists outside government can evaluate the conclusion.

Trust does not come from telling people that experts have checked something.

Trust comes from allowing people to see how it was checked.

The larger story is governance

This is why I worry that vaccine-injury inquiries, despite being necessary, could inadvertently become a shield around the larger COVID story.

Imagine the political convenience of ending the reckoning with a narrow conclusion:

Some people suffered vaccine injuries. Governments were too aggressive with mandates. Compensation systems were inadequate. Communications were poor. We apologize. Lessons learned.

Case closed.

But that would leave unanswered some of the most consequential questions of the entire pandemic.

We still do not know with certainty how SARS-CoV-2 entered the human population. The WHO itself says crucial evidence remains unavailable.

We know that governments funded international research involving dangerous pathogens.

We know that high-containment laboratories exchanged pathogen samples across borders.

We know that Canada’s most secure infectious-disease laboratory experienced serious security failures involving scientists with undisclosed relationships with Chinese institutions.

We know that U.S.-funded organizations collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

We know that researchers contemplated advanced coronavirus experiments before the pandemic, including through the unfunded DEFUSE proposal.

We know that government agencies and intelligence-linked institutions have long taken an interest in biotechnology because the same scientific capabilities capable of preventing pandemics can also have national-security applications.

None of those facts proves that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created, that it was a biological weapon or that a particular government intentionally released it.

They demonstrate something arguably more important:

The boundary between public-health research, biodefence, national security and advanced biotechnology has become dangerously difficult for the public to see.

That is the investigation we still need.

Follow the network, not the political narrative

The central mistake would be searching for a single villain.

It is tempting to blame China.

It is equally tempting to blame the United States.

Others will blame pharmaceutical companies, intelligence agencies, the WHO or whichever political party happened to govern their country during the pandemic.

Reality may be far less convenient.

The modern biological-research system is transnational.

Chinese scientists collaborate with Western scientists. Western governments finance foreign research. Military agencies finance civilian technology. Pharmaceutical companies work with government regulators. Public-health agencies exchange pathogens internationally. Universities, charities and private contractors sit between the different institutions.

That does not automatically constitute a conspiracy.

It constitutes a network.

And networks can produce catastrophic failures without requiring every participant to understand the entire system.

That possibility is precisely why a genuinely independent COVID inquiry should not begin with a predetermined theory about what happened.

It should reconstruct the network.

Follow the money.

Follow the grants.

Follow the samples.

Follow the laboratory partnerships.

Follow the unpublished proposals.

Follow the security assessments.

Follow the manufacturing changes.

Follow the regulator correspondence.

Follow the intelligence assessments.

Then place the timeline in chronological order and let the evidence determine the conclusion.

We should be capable of holding two ideas at once

It should be possible to say that vaccines prevented severe disease and also investigate people who suffered genuine adverse reactions.

It should be possible to recognize that most published scientific evidence currently favours zoonotic emergence while admitting that a laboratory-related origin remains unresolved.

It should be possible to recognize legitimate biological research in Ukraine while questioning why governments communicated so poorly about sensitive pathogen programs.

It should be possible to acknowledge that residual plasmid DNA is an expected manufacturing impurity while independently examining disputed measurements concerning how much remained in particular vaccine lots.

And it should certainly be possible to investigate international high-risk pathogen research without accusing every scientist involved of deliberately creating biological weapons.

A mature society should not require citizens to choose between unquestioning institutional loyalty and believing every allegation appearing online.

There is a third option.

Demand the records.

Demand reproducible science.

Demand independent testing.

Demand conflicts of interest be disclosed.

Demand that government secrecy be justified narrowly rather than reflexively.

Demand that researchers explain precisely what experiments were performed and why.

Demand that regulators demonstrate their conclusions rather than merely announce them.

And demand that an inquiry into one part of the pandemic does not become an excuse to forget all of the others.

Because vaccine injuries, vaccine manufacturing, laboratory safety, international pathogen research and the origin of SARS-CoV-2 are not necessarily the same story.

But they belong to the same historical reckoning.

If the coming inquiries tell us only who was injured by a medical intervention after the pandemic began, while refusing to examine the system of research, funding, security and regulation that existed before it began, then we will have investigated the aftermath while leaving the architecture untouched.

That would not be accountability.

It would be amnesia with paperwork.