Six years ago, as we were beginning to unravel the lies at the heart of the coronavirus pandemic, we encountered one doctor’s very specific prevarications about his role in the Wuhan laboratory that had developed the virus. Paul Jacob wrote about him in “Twelve Monkeys in Charge?,” published here on June 18, 2020. The man’s name? Lieber.
In the midst of all this has been one Dr. Charles Lieber, a 61-year-old nanoscience researcher, who recently “has been indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of making false statements and will be arraigned in federal court in Boston at a later date. Lieber was arrested on Jan. 28, 2020, and charged by criminal complaint.” He allegedly lied about his relationship with China’s Thousand Talents Plan and his role as a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology in China.
Where SARS-CoV-2 — the coronavirus of the current pandemic — apparently came from.
The case received scant attention at the time. Paul Jacob took note of this lack of attention in early 2021.
But what happened to Dr. Lieber after that?
Lieber was convicted of six felonies in December 2021, including two counts of making false statements to the FBI and investigators from the Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health regarding his participation in the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program, as well as four counts of filing false tax returns. Convicted in December 2021 he was sentenced to one day in prison — time already served (before trial) — as well as “two years of supervised release including half-a-year of house arrest and a $50,000 fine,” according to The Harvard Crimson in early April 2023.
The Lieber case is not directly related to the Wuhan gain-of-function research, or its funding; it is a separate issue rising out of a Department of Justice investigation of academic espionage at American universities.
Precisely how Lieber’s nanotech work fit in with the Wuhan effort we do not know. The investigations, so far, appear to be focused on following the money.
Sure, this story is about money, too. But a different stream of money. Different from the Fauci-EcoHealth Alliance-Wuhan lab stream.
In April 2025, after release from home confinement, Lieber became a full-time chair professor at Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, a graduate school of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen, China. He has also been employed as SMART Investigator at the newly-established Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation. Some see this as a case of “brain drain” of U.S. talent to China.
To clarify this situation — which Paul Jacob brought up mainly as a way to show the failure of major media to investigate the bizarre relationship between China and American scientists — here we go: there is no direct link between the crimes for which Lieber was convicted and the creation of the infamous “China virus.” Lieber’s crime was hiding money, not hiding a virus; he hid his relationship with China while declaring to his American funder, the National Institute for Health, that he had no such ties.
A kind of fraud? A spy-like fraud, perhaps.
But undoubtedly there is more to uncover.