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“President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered U.S. intelligence officials to ‘redouble’ their efforts to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, including any possibility the trail might lead to a Chinese laboratory.” AP News
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report.” Wall Street Journal
Many on both sides call for further investigation into COVID-19’s origins and greater transparency from China:
“In preparation for the WHO-China joint mission, Chinese officials examined 76,253 cases of fever or respiratory illness in 233 health-care institutions from Oct. 1 to Dec. 10, 2019. Out of this mass of records, they identified 92 people who might have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the autumn. However, on further scrutiny, all 92 cases were rejected as covid…
“Chinese officials refused to let the WHO see raw data on these potentially significant 92 early cases. Moreover, the survey was too small and selective. Any investigation should reach back to much earlier, to at least the summer of 2019, and involve matched control patients and healthy controls from other populations in Hubei province and elsewhere in China. This wasn’t done, and then the 92 cases were tossed out altogether. WHO officials left with a feeling the job was unfinished… [China] has refused to even consider the kind of rigorous probe that is necessary. That only deepens the suspicions it has something to hide.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“For now, the Biden administration intends to press the WHO to perform a second, more serious study to account for the lab-leak hypothesis and prod the intelligence community to dig deeper. That’s all well and good. But neither approach will yield much clarity on the origins of the virus because the main obstacle is and has always been China…
“It’s China’s government that has failed to grant researchers and scientists unfettered access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the blood samples of those who were first infected. It’s China’s government that first targeted the doctors, nurses and journalists who tried to warn their own country and the world about the outbreak. And it was China that initially denied in January 2020 that the virus could be transmitted between people…
“Biden should make an offer to Chinese President Xi Jinping: If you want to put an end to all this talk about Covid-19 originating in a government lab, then hand over the data the world’s scientific community has been demanding for nearly a year. If you continue to stonewall, then we will have to assume you have something to hide.”
Eli Lake, Bloomberg
Other opinions below.
“Much of the information about the WIV, the research it was conducting, and the lack of proper safety protocol in the lab has been available for months. We’ve known since last year that in 2018 U.S. science diplomats warned the State Department that the WIV’s poor lab practices were extremely concerning, given the dangerous research its researchers were conducting…
"We have also known for months that the WIV was experimenting with various coronavirus strains because Dr. Shi Zhengli, the head of the coronavirus project at the WIV, admitted as much to multiple publications. And we have known since late last year, because of a Trump State Department investigation, that Dr. Shi’s research was potentially gain-of-function, which means it was meant to ‘improve the ability of a pathogen,’ in this case a coronavirus, to ‘cause disease.’ Fauci has known all of this for months, so why is he just now beginning to admit that the lab leak theory is worth consideration?”
Kaylee McGhee White, Washington Examiner
“If Donald Trump had listened to Tom Cotton in January of 2020, he would likely still be president today. But while the rest of the Hill obsessed over the (first) impeachment proceedings against Trump, the Arkansas senator was trying to sound the alarm about the novel coronavirus. Cotton was right when he repeatedly warned the White House that China was actively concealing the extent and nature of the virus, and he was right when he questioned its origins…
“Now that Trump is out of office, the media have slowly but surely deemed it safe to raise the topic again. We have learned almost nothing new about the virus's origins since one year ago, but now the public health ‘experts’ and the press are finally taking the lab-leak hypothesis seriously. Cotton asked all the right questions while the rest of the Beltway obsessed over stupid Trumpian palace intrigues and petty partisan fights. He was the leader we needed when we weren't ready to listen. He deserves an apology from the media and the scientists who smeared him.”
Tiana Lowe, Washington Examiner
“Given what we know about the sloppiness and carelessness of lab personnel in Wuhan, a leak of a naturally occurring virus was always a distinct possibility. The Chinese government’s subsequent actions strengthen that belief. They may not have any better idea of the origin of the coronavirus than anyone else. But it’s clear that they feared it was a leak from the start…
“They covered up the three serious illnesses among lab workers from November 2019, destroyed medical records, denied the WHO team full access to the lab and its records, and continue to this day to obstruct investigations into the origins of the virus. China may be the most guilty-looking innocent party in history. Or they may know a lot more than they’re letting on.”
Rick Moran, PJ Media
“If this previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report is accurate, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had three hospitalizations either simultaneously or in rapid succession. This means that one of three things happened. Either three employees of the WIV caught a particularly virulent common seasonal illness, bad enough to put healthy adults in the hospital, right before the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, and completely unrelated to that outbreak; their illness was connected to their work at the WIV, but what they caught was not SARS-CoV-2; or they caught SARS-CoV-2 and were the first cluster of COVID-19 cases. Yes, this is circumstantial evidence, but the circumstantial evidence keeps piling up higher and higher.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“[What this episode reveals] is the vulnerabilities in the mainstream- and liberal-media ecosystem… Progressive advocates will take strong positions on a factual question, such as whether COVID-19 originated inside or outside a laboratory, based entirely on how they believe political actors will use the answer…
“Not only will they reject a factual possibility that might flatter their political opponents, but they will assume anybody who takes a different view must also hold political motivations. Since many advocates of lab-leak theory also endorse racist beliefs, anybody who believes it might be true shares in their guilt. What’s completely absent from their thinking is any notion that the truth of the question could be abstracted from motive… Twitter is the milieu in which the opinions of elite reporters take shape. And very often it is a petri dish of tribalism and confirmation bias.”
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
“Politifact’s now-retracted fact check deeming lab leak theorists to have their ‘pants on fire’ ran in September 2020. Also in September of 2020, Boston magazine ran a profile of Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute, who believes the virus escaped from the biolab in Wuhan. It’s clear from the article that while Chan perhaps had a minority viewpoint, this was the kind of thing that was the subject of ongoing disagreement among researchers…
“When New York Magazine ran its lab leak theory story in January 2021, I tweeted disparaging things about it only to be told quietly by a number of research scientists that I was wrong and plenty of people in the science community thought this was plausible… it’s increasingly clear that this was a huge fiasco for the mainstream press that got way over their skis in terms of discourse-policing, and there is in fact a serious scientific question as to where the virus came from.”
Matt Yglesias, Slow Boring
Some note that “Trump said at a news conference [in April 2020] that he had a ‘high degree of confidence’ that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab. This didn’t jibe with a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, though, which said that while that was a possibility, it needed further examination. When pressed on what evidence he had, Trump responded, ‘I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.’ Trump at many other points suggested such a thing, without backing it up…
“Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also leaned in. He told ABC News around the same time that ‘there’s enormous evidence that this is where this began.’ He added: ‘I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.’ Except the ‘enormous’ evidence wasn’t produced by the Trump administration, for some reason. Nor was even piecemeal evidence… It has become evident that some corners of the mainstream media overcorrected when it came to [this] one particular theory from Trump and his allies… [but] given everything we know about how Trump handled such things, caution and skepticism were invited.”
Aaron Blake, Washington Post
Some others argue, “Instead of calling for a new and better inquiry into origins, let’s stipulate that pandemics can result from natural spillovers or from laboratory accidents—and then let’s move along to implications. One important question has already gotten airtime (from right-wing media, at least): Should scientists be fiddling with pathogenic genomes, to measure out the steps they’d have to take before ascending to pandemic-level virulence?”
Daniel Engber, The Atlantic
