A clump of square buildings hunker in the forests of Wuhan China. At the epicenter is a windowless steel structure, which houses a bio-safety level 4 laboratory. The sterile lab handles some of the world's most contagious pathogens and also conducts classified research for the Chinese military.
The facility is located just a few kilometers from a "wet market" where the first Coronavirus infections emerged. In recent weeks, the Chinese scientific lab has bolted into the headlines as scientists take a fresh look at a once discredited theory that a leak at the facility may have been the origin of the Coronavirus.
Nearly 18 months ago, the official version circulated by American and Chinese health officials claimed the virus spread from the market, where vendors sell meat, fish, produce and some live animals. Scientists agreed the Coronavirus was naturally transmitted from a bat to humans. Few questioned the thesis.
A brave scientist speculated the virus may have spread as a result of an inadvertent leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (WIV). Molecular biologist Richard H. Ebright expressed concerns because of previous leaks at labs in Beijing. Facebook and Google banned any discussion of the lab leak theory.
In recent weeks, a drizzle of conjecture has evolved into a downpour of circumstantial as well as unambiguous evidence that the Coronavirus may be linked to a leak from the Wuhan facility, despite continued and often contentious denials from Communist Chinese officials.
Last year President Trump publicly speculated the virus may have been engineered in a laboratory, fueling a firestorm of outrage from scientists and the media. They coordinated an attack on the accusation, demeaning it as a conspiracy theory. The lab leak thesis was effectively banned.
The Washington Post huffed that the president and his supporters were "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." The New York Times labeled the claim a "fringe theory." The media piled on to promote its narrative that Trump was solely to blame for the virus.
Still questions lingered in medical chat rooms and among scientists whose concerns were never made public. There were coincidences too foreboding to deny. However, Dr. Anthony Fauci led a chorus of scientists who blotted out even the possibility of a leak being the origin for the pandemic.
A recently-released trove of emails from Dr. Fauci, the government's top specialist during COVID, revealed at the time he was pooh-poohing the leak publicly, he and his associates and colleagues privately discussed the possibility that the virus had indeed escaped from the Wuhan lab.
As early as last January, Dr. Fauci was alerted about the suspicious characteristics of COVID samples. Kristian Anderson and five virologists, noted "unusual features" in the virus and added "one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered."
Anderson also noted in his email to Dr. Fauci that he and his team "all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from an evolutionary theory." The team's initial impression later flip-flopped, but they offered no evidence to support their new claim the laboratory scenario was no longer plausible.
The emails were publicly disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Judicial Watch. The duplicity of Dr. Fauci was further exposed when another FOIA request uncovered U.S. tax-payer funding of the Wuhan lab, in spite of the virologist's earlier denials in a Senate hearing.
Pressed again on the matter, Dr. Fauci told lawmakers the government granted $600,000 in funding over a five year period. But documents furnished by the Health and Human Services divulged that between 2014 and 2019, the U.S. provided $826,277 in taxpayer funds.
The money came from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) directed by Dr. Fauci. Documents show the funds were provided over a six-year period for "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence." NIAID funneled the money through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance.
Perhaps, it was just a coincidence that the Wuhan lab was conducting studies on bats and Coronavirus at the time of the outbreak. The U.S. State Department raised eyebrows in January when it released a bombshell fact sheet that was generally ignored by a partisan media.
The fact sheet confirmed Wuhan was conducting experiments on a bat virus, including "gain of function" research on the engineering of "chimeric viruses" or man-made pathogens.
Gain of function is used to describe a process that alters an organism or a disease in a way that increases its pathogenesis, transmission or the types of hosts it can infect. Done ethically, this type of research is useful because it allows scientists to develop vaccines and medicines for treatment.
In the wrong hands, this research could be used to engineer an existing virus for rapid transmission or to cause a pandemic pathogen to replicate more quickly, increasing the spread to humans. Research groups in the EU and US both regulate the oversight of this process in most labs to ensure safety.
In its document, the State Department insisted it had "reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV (Wuhan lab) became sick in the autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses."
Vanity Fair reported some officials at the State Department were explicitly told not to explore the Wuhan lab's "gain of function" research because it would bring what the publication described as "unwelcome" attention on U.S. government funding of the research. It would open "a can of worms" the outlet said.
The State Department claims triggered questions about the credibility of Wuhan lab's senior researcher Shi Zhengli who said there were "zero infections" among the WIV staff. Denials from Chinese officials escalated in the face of a Wall Street Journal investigative report that fueled renewed speculation.
NBC News, quoting U.S. intelligence officials, followed with a broadcast revealing that a database of more than 22,000 virus samples at the Wuhan lab were removed from public view for so-called security reasons. The disclosure cast a shadow over the probe by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Peter B. Embark, the head of the WHO group that investigated the origins, admitted in late February that his group "didn't do an audit of any of these labs, so we don't really have hard facts or detailed data done at the Wuhan lab." Yet he still contended it was "extremely unlikely" the virus originated at the lab.
That explanation did not satisfy some virologists. Last month, 18 virologists published a letter in Science criticizing WHO 's joint investigation with China. "Although there were no finding in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident...the two theories were not given balanced consideration."
Even the WHO director general conceded the joint investigation's report lacked data to support its findings. The State Department backed by 13 countries said the WHO probe was "significantly delayed and lacked access to complete, original data samples."
With interest heating up, Republicans are calling for President Biden to declassify all U.S. intelligence related to the Wuhan lab and the COVID-19 pandemic, so the American people can get answers they deserve. Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan initially balked at releasing the intel.
This is the moment for politicians to put aside their differences and use the full resources of the government to investigate the lab leak theory. There has been too much government foot-dragging, failed probes derailed by China and a lack of transparency on this critical matter.
What's maddening is why it has taken so long for the country's chief pandemic expert Dr. Fauci to unequivocally determine the origin of a deadly virus that killed nearly 600,000 Americans. The media has been complicit by its lazy reporting of the standard, approved version of the origin.
Why was it so critical for Dr. Fauci and other scientist to cling to the wet market theory? Why did it take 18 months for the circumstantial evidence to appear in the public domain? Was scientific curiosity shelved until after a presidential election because Coronavirus was the Democrats' campaign gift?
Don't expect answers to those questions from the administration, the media or the party in power. The opinion here is the wet market thesis will never be overturned. The lab leak scenario will be swept under the Oval Office carpet after a "show" investigation. There is no appetite to rattle relations with China.
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