Commentary: Now that the pandemic is over, does it matter how COVID-19 started? A news investigation confronts us with some hard truths.
Cory Franklin and Robert Weinstein: If a lab leak led to COVID-19, there are truths we must not ignoreOpinion content—editorials, columns and guest commentaries—is created independent of news reporting and is exclusive to subscribers.Members of a World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 3, 2021.
Since 2019 when COVID-19 emerged in China, scientists worldwide have been trying to ascertain the origin of the virus. The two major theories are a natural spillover from bats to an animal source and then to humans or a laboratory accident. A related question is whether the virus emerged from nature or was the result of human-made genetic manipulation.Until recently, although no animal intermediary between virus-carrying bats and humans has been identified, Chinese scientists and many of their Western counterparts, including prominent American researchers, argued that animals transmitted the virus to humans.
had a say in determining which facts outsiders could investigate. Not incidentally, the natural-origin theory also protected Chinese scientists and their foreign sources of funding from inconvenient questions about safety protocols and the wisdom or foolishness of dangerous research projects. In the past year as the pandemic wound down, the “very likely” theory of an animal vector has been met with increasing skepticism. Many in the scientific community, as well as some in U.S. intelligence circles, do not buy the remarkable coincidence that the first COVID-19 cases just happened to appear in Wuhan, China, the site of the Chinese government-run Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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