Lab leak

If someone had asked you in winter 2019 your views on gain-of-function research, you would likely have given them a blank look. But since the Covid pandemic, and with the Wall Street Journal revealing in February that the US Department of Energy now thinks Covid-19 is likely to have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, gain-of-function research — often conducted to make viruses more infectious and more deadly — is a matter of enormous significance and should be at the forefront of a national conversation about the very real risks it poses. For more than a century virologists have worked to identify and understand viruses, whether or not they’re pathogens, for reasons ranging from pure science to applications in everything from agriculture to vaccines.

Wednesday’s hearing on the origin of Covid-19 by the select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic was long overdue. It has been more than three years since the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2, was first detected in Wuhan, China. Yet far too little has been done in the United States to find out how the pandemic started. Separate investigations by US intelligence agencies have led to one assessment of a lab leak with moderate confidence by the FBI, a scattering of low-confidence assessments — the Department of Energy leans toward a lab origin while four agencies lean toward a natural origin — and two agencies undecided.

Neither the political left nor the political right understands Anthony Fauci. To the left, Fauci is a patron saint to be thanked and worshipped. They fashion candles, hymns and magazine covers after him. They canonize him much the same way they canonized Ruth Bader Ginsburg, though I suspect that if you stopped them on the street and asked for details of a Ginsburg opinion, they would come up empty beyond screaming “Notorious RBG.” Anthony Fauci is venerated much the same way. The right has compared Fauci to Nazi ministers of information, a Luciferian demigod drunk on pandemic power, a liar and hypnotist willing to do anything to retain his newfound celebrity and near-total grip on pandemic messaging — a grip that only solidified after Joe Biden’s presidential election.

What do you do when a health crisis gets politicized beyond reason? You send in a bunch of hyper-partisan agencies to investigate, of course! For months, anyone who doubted that the coronavirus originated from a wet market in Wuhan was labeled a fringe, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. The 'serious people' in our media, as Jonathan Karl labeled them, mocked the likes of former president Donald Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Rand Paul for even broaching the subject. However, towards the end of Trump’s administration, classified information revealed that in November 2019, three workers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology went to a hospital due to flu-like symptoms. The press would have been totally fine ignoring this inconvenient information.

A top editor at the New York Times instructed Times staffers not to investigate the origins of COVID-19, two Times employees confirmed today. ‘In early 2020,’ a veteran Times employee tells me, ‘I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19. I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus. There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that [COVID-19 was manmade or had leaked accidentally from a lab].' The global pandemic was then in its early stages. Donald Trump was running for reelection and calling SARS-CoV-2 the ‘Chinese virus’.