US President Joe Biden has reversed his path and ordered the US intelligence community to report on the virus in 90 days, as evidence is growing that coronavirus might have escaped from a lab of Wuhan Institute of Virology. Even reporters and media professionals who were not bothered to ask tough questions until recently have started pressing the White House for answers.
Last year, American media disregarded the idea of the accidental release of the virus from a lab in Wuhan, labelling it “debunked,” “dangerous” or “doubtable,” and a far-reaching conspiracy theory. However, in reality, this virus erupted in Wuhan – home to the largest research laboratory for China that studies bat coronaviruses – would have been an astonishing coincidence and had no link to the lab. It has been known since April 2020, that in 2018, US officials complained about poor safety standards at the Wuhan lab.
Since then, more evidence has emerged. Thanks to Nicholas Wade, the former science journalist, who wrote the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, it was known that Wuhan’s lab has performed risky and controversial ‘first-gain’ experiments that they are “intending to create new coronaviruses with the greatest infectiveness possible for human cells” — and that many of them have been performed by researchers there at the Wuhan lab.
It was also known that coronaviruses have a lengthy history of escaping from laboratories, notably the SARS1 virus, which escaped four times from Beijing’s Chinese National Institute of Virology (as well as labs in Singapore and Taiwan). In November 2019, three scientists from Wuhan laboratory, roughly at the start of the pandemic with symptoms consistent with CoV-19, reported by The Wall Street Journal earlier last week.
The virus, on the other hand, has yet to be proven to have originated in nature. Because the Chinese dictatorship has almost surely destroyed all evidence at the Wuhan facility, it can never be truly said with surety that the virus leaked from a lab. The Chinese Communist Party will never participate in an independent investigation because, as long as the virus could have come from nature, it cannot be held entirely responsible despite its lies and coverup. If, on the other hand, the virus emerged from a Chinese lab as a result of deficient safety and reckless research procedures, it is rather an act of the state, and the Chinese dictatorship is personally accountable for a pandemic that has killed millions.
The Chinese authorities have every reason to ignore the lab leak. But why were the news and media organisations so willing to ignore it? It was because President Donald Trump and his followers, such as Senator Tom Cotton, were the most outspoken proponents of the thesis (R-Ark). In the run-up to the 2020 election, any attempt to blame China for the devastation caused by the virus was interpreted as an attempt to divert blame from Trump, who was cast as the villain in the covid-19 tale.
Another reason could be because the lab leak theory threatens to entangle Anthony S. Fauci, the media’s hero. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the National Institutes of Health, turned discovered to have given a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance in the United States, which then subcontracted the research to the Wuhan lab. Fauci acknowledges this but maintains that the funds were not used to finance the gain of function studies.
Indeed, Shi Zhengli — Wuhan lab’s “Bat Woman” — stated in her grant bids, which are open to the public, that she intended to utilise the funds for gain-of-function research. Fauci has already stated that he supports such studies. Even though the US government had imposed an embargo on the gain of function research, the NIAID was financing research in Wuhan.
At the very least, NIAID was financing risky research in a lab with scant safety procedures. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) sent Fauci a letter seeking answers, but he has yet to respond. Gallagher said, “We need to declassify all the intelligence, and we need all the email traffic relating to these grants.”
The public health bureaucracy in the United States has little interest in tracing a trail that could lead back to itself. Neither does China’s Communist government. This is why the free press had to perform its duties. Any intrepid reporter could have found all of the facts that had been discovered. None, however, did so. That was a heinous breach of duty and a promotion of a left-wing agenda at the expense of public health and safety.