by Jeff Smith, Real Clear World:
Four years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan, what do we know about the origin of the SARSCOV2 virus?
We were presented at the outset with two competing theories: natural-origin spillover from animals to humans, and accidental lab leak. And at the outset, a cadre of elite scientists passionately argued that the evidence overwhelmingly favored a natural origin. With comparable fervor, they dismissed the possibility that SARSCOV2 leaked from a lab as a “conspiracy theory.”
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
With a few notable exceptions, mainstream media outlets and the larger scientific community vehemently nodded in agreement. NPR said the lab-leak theory was “debunked,” Vanity Fair called it a “right-wing coronavirus conspiracy,” and Facebook banned posts suggesting the virus may have been manufactured in a lab.
Four years later that narrative has begun to crack—and rightly so.
It was always a lie; one of the most consequential lies of the 21st century. Like all great lies it perfectly inverted the truth: the evidence supporting natural spillover has always been thin. Conversely, the evidence pointing to a lab leak has always been compelling and has grown substantially more persuasive with time.
A coalition of elite scientists and complicit media outlets have proven remarkably effective in suppressing the truth for this long. But in recent months, as congressional investigations have intensified, honest scientists and journalists have begun challenging the false consensus with greater alacrity as new revelations have tipped the scales toward lab leak even further.
The clique of elite scientists propagating the natural-spillover theory have always had several problems on their hands. Despite an exhaustive four-year search, no intermediate animal host has ever been found. The closest natural relatives to SARSCOV2 are found in bats in Laos and in Yunnan Province over 600 miles away.
Two of the more popular arguments advanced by spillover partisans—that pandemic began at the Huanan wet market in Wuhan and that it jumped to humans from raccoon dogs and pangolins—have withered under scrutiny. The academic papers supporting both arguments have been hollowed out by fatal challenges to the underlying data, methods, or conclusions.
To date, a natural-spillover explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic remains little more than a distant theoretical possibility.
The Lab-Leak Theory
The most obvious piece of incriminating evidence for the lab-leak theory has always been the existence of a biolab in Wuhan just miles away from the initial outbreak. This wasn’t just any old biolab—the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was an advanced research facility studying coronaviruses that “collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military.” And this wasn’t just any old coronavirus research—the WIV was conducting the riskiest viral research in the world.
Gain-of-function research of concern—which can make viruses more transmissible to humans, ostensibly in order to create vaccines—was so risky, and the chance of causing an accidental pandemic was so great, that the U.S. government banned funding for this research in 2014. Nevertheless, U.S. agencies continued funding this dangerous research at the WIV, even before the moratorium was officially lifted in December 2017.
This was a spectacularly irresponsible decision. U.S. authorities had visited the WIV and found it to have wildly inadequate safety protocols. In a truly Strangelovian twist, we later learned that the WIV was conducting virus research that theoretically could end human civilization in BSL-2 conditions, roughly the equivalent of a dentist’s office safety protocols. “That’s screwed up,” responded Dr. Ian Lipkin, an early proponent of natural spillover, after learning of the WIV’s safety protocols. “People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”
Read More @ RealClearWorld.com
