The Covid-19 pandemic recently completed its third year. Life has apparently returned to normal for people in many countries. But Covid itself lingers. Milder variants with significantly higher fatality rates than seasonal flu are circulating. The symptoms of Covid-19 still plague the afflicted. The official death toll from Covid worldwide surpasses six millionwhile the excess death count is above 20 million. Just a few weeks ago, China abandoned its zero Covid policy overnight without proper preparation, inducing a catastrophe of millions deaths under the Omicron wave, as many elderly people were not vaccinated. Japan has recently recorded a new peak of Covid deaths in December 2022. To paraphrase Yogi Berra [jogador de beisebol, famoso por suas fases folclóricas] — the pandemic is not over until it is over.
Against this backdrop of human tragedy, a pandemic that not only claimed human lives but also altered social norms and deepened political failures, the mainstream media failed to critically cover or objectively scrutinize the central question about the origin of Covid-19. Similarly, national leaders and international agencies remained callously silent during the most recent United Nations, G7 and G20 summits—not a single word about the need to ascertain the source of this existential risk. In the United States, where the Democratic Party has controlled Congress from 2021 until now, Congress has taken no action, such as issuing subpoenas to relevant US-based research entities that have partnered with Wuhan coronavirus labs.
It is the government’s essential duty to find the source of any major disasters and formulate the necessary reforms to prevent future occurrences. Imagine if there were no government investigations after catastrophes like the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, or other similar disasters. We would have been deprived of essential information to prevent future similar incidents.
Investigating the origin of Covid is a comparatively urgent priority. It is a public health disaster of unfathomable magnitude that killed 1 million Americansmore than the total American casualties in World War II.
In 2021, President Biden ordered a 90-day intelligence review of the origin of Covid-19, but the process ended inconclusively, even though a federal agency determined, with a moderate level of confidence, that Covid was leaked from a laboratory. This preliminary finding is supported by internal US State Department emails in early 2020. Given the dire scale of the social and economic damage wrought by Covid, it is assumed that the US government intends to continue the investigation into your origin. However, the Biden administration refused in late 2022 to support a post-9/11-style bipartisan independent commission on the origin and response to the pandemic.
It is difficult to reconcile this decision, as well as the behavior of Congressional Democrats, with the declaration from President Biden in 2021 that “our efforts to understand the origins of this pandemic will not stop. We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world so that we can take all necessary precautions to prevent it from happening again.”
Only one congressional hearing has been held in the last three years on the danger of Gain of Function (GdF) research, even though it may have led to the Covid pandemic. Previous GdF experiments, which involve deliberately creating stronger viruses for study and future prevention, have resulted in artificial chimeric viruses that are highly potent and transmissible. This hearing was held by the Republican minority, led by Senator Rand Paul. Many Democrats immediately and reflexively dismissed the hearing as a political attack on Anthony Fauciformer director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which strongly supported risky GdF research for many years.
However, such rejection, based on aversion to the messenger and not on facts and details, is foolish policy and unhealthy science. Republicans and Democrats die from Covid. What’s more, it’s not just Republicans who believe Covid likely leaked from a lab, but most Democratic voters as well, according to a search 2021. As for the science: Circumstantial evidence, accumulating since 2020 (despite obstructions from the Chinese government and US-based entities) points to an accidental laboratory leak. Attempts by the mainstream media to trump false claims by GdF virologists with clear conflicts of interest do not prevent the natural origin claim from crumbling under scrutiny. The alleged animal host remains mysteriously elusive. There is no evidence of an infection trail from animal farms to the Wuhan market, no evidence of wildlife traders testing at a higher positive rate than the general population, and no evidence of rapid early mutations typical of a zoonotic jump.
Additional misconduct related to the general source investigation comes unexpectedly from the unscientific behavior of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) leadership, which supports the GdF research, and a small group of GdF virologists, some of whom have undisclosed connections to the laboratories of Wuhan. Meanwhile, in public, they attack people as conspirators and racists for merely hinting at the possibility of a leak from the lab. There are many renowned voices outside the GdF circle who are calling for a real investigation, including Drs. Richard Ebright of Rutgers, Alina Chan of Harvard/MIT, David Relman of Stanford, David Baltimore of Caltech, Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, who leads the Lancet Covid-19 Commission and Many other scientists from several countries. These scientists are not right-wing extremists.
The indifference to the origin of Covid on the Democratic side is quite disconcerting. After all, Democrats and many on the left are intensely concerned about the danger of climate change accelerated by human activity, which they see as a existential threat for Humanity. Former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, detailed this case, though not without some skeptical resistance, which Democrats reject.
Now, however, Democrats are facing their own version of an inconvenient truth: the GdF poll doesn’t deliver benefits tangible scientific data, while running the risk of a pandemic in the case of a laboratory leak. Furthermore, Fauci and GdF virologists seem determined to destroy the public’s trust in science with misleading origin narratives that impede a lab leak investigation. His motive is to protect his legacy and maintain research grants, not to pursue the public good. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Democratic President Barack Obama forbade the GdF experiments in 2014.
In recent years, the likelihood of viruses escaping laboratories has only increased due to the proliferation of research facilities that study dangerous viruses, some of them being GdF viruses in densely populated areas such as wuhan, rotterdam in the Netherlands, as well as Boston, Massachusetts; and raleigh, NC Building more labs without proper supervision simply increases the likelihood of lab leaks. Consequently, when we are debating the creation of man-made GdF viruses that could affect our entire civilization, then, just like with climate change, the world must have a say. This cannot be the exclusive domain of GdF virologists. There is absolutely no reason for Democrats to focus on one existential risk but ignore another. The same goes for Republicans.
However, there is little evidence that the world is taking this threat seriously. At the recent G7 meeting, climate security was high on the agenda, but biosecurity around GdF was nowhere to be found. Without a real investigation into the origin of Covid, world leaders simply lack the urgency to address this issue. The inconvenient truth is that the Covid pandemic has killed millions, while climate change has not. GdF biosecurity was also not discussed at the G20 summit in late 2022. declaration of leaders, Covid was mentioned 14 times in the context of vaccines, financial stability and global supply chains. Even tourism recovery gained a full paragraph. However, there was not a single word about the origin of Covid.
President Biden he spoke incisively in 2021 about the need to discover the origins of Covid-19: “The world deserves answers and I will not rest until we have them. His statement concludes: “We must have a full and transparent investigation of this global tragedy. Nothing less is acceptable.”
We absolutely agree that nothing less is acceptable, neither for the 20 million dead nor for current and future generations. The way forward is for Democrats to join Republicans for an apolitical, bipartisan investigation. Nothing less is acceptable.
Jianli Yang is founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China and author of ‘For Us, The Living: A Journey to Shine the Light on Truth’. Austin Lin is a scientist at the State University of New York and a consultant for the Citizen Power Initiatives for China
©2023 National Review. Published with permission. original in English.
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