Early in the pandemic, conservative newspapers, like the Daily Mail and the Washington Times, and Senator Tom Cotton raised the possibility of a Chinese lab leak.
The scientific establishment also weighed in, disregarding early papers from Chinese and American scientists with evidence that suggested a lab leak origin.
One group, citing mostly Chinese sources, declared in The Lancet that the coronavirus originated in wildlife, not a laboratory, and praised Chinese scientists and public-health officials "Who continue to save lives and protect global health." Five other virologists in a letter to Nature Medicine stated that "SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." Anthony Fauci, in a May 2020 National Geographic interview, said the evidence indicated that the virus "Evolved in nature and then jumped species" and had not escaped from a Chinese lab.
Scientists are finally beginning to take the possibility of Chinese negligence or malfeasance seriously.
In a letter to the journal Science, 18 leading virologists wrote that accidental lab release remains a viable possibility and urged the Wuhan scientists to cooperate fully with additional investigations.
Even more disturbing than the Chinese government's attempts to obfuscate the pandemic's origins is the way scientists and the media nearly uniformly insisted that a lab leak was out of the question.
Perhaps, Western scientists feared that the possibility of Chinese culpability would reflect badly on them and their own viral-gain-of-function research.
Thursday, May 27, 2021
On Covid-19 Origins, Elites Followed Politics, Not Science
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