The hunt for the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, AKA COVID-19, has become a government-wide investigation. The intelligence community, public health agencies, scientific research departments, and colleges and university labs are all trying to unravel the mystery of how a bat disease made the jump to humans.
The Chinese Communists have an answer. They claim the pandemic originated in America.
A Chinese government-sponsored propaganda paper states, "The US should cease from shifting blame and evading responsibility, stop finding external excuses for its internal malaise, and genuinely reflect on and overhaul its public health policies. The US cannot continue to turn a deaf ear to the numerous questions over its conduct."
The Chinese claim that COVID-19 was present in the U.S. long before it appeared in China. Because the Chinese government destroyed most of the records that would have helped unravel the COVID origin mystery, they can say pretty much anything they wish and pretend it's true.
There are two dominant theories about the origin of COVID-19. The first is the "natural" or zoonotic origins theory. Many scientists love this theory because, in the history of human diseases, almost all viruses have infected humans this way, moving from one animal to another and then infecting people. Until evidence is found that points to another means of transmission, many scientists will cling to the natural origins theory.
The lab leak theory has many variations but the major elements all relate to the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was cited numerous times for safety violations, and a leak involving some deadly pathogen may have been inevitable. It opened in 2018 and was China's first biosafety level 4 laboratory.
Any evidence that the COVID-19 coronavirus leaked from Wuhan has long since been scrubbed by the Chinese Communists. What we have are hints, elliptical references, and other circumstantial evidence that point to the Wuhan lab as the source, but unfortunately, there is nothing definitive.
Most serious researchers and scientists have traced the origins of COVID-19 to Wuhan, where it first appeared (according to public records) near a "wet market" that sold live animals for food. The Wuhan lab sits less than a mile from that wet market, and some Wuhan lab workers fell ill in 2019. Some researchers claim that the workers fell ill after eating infected meat. Since the records, including autopsy results of workers who died, have not been handed over by the Chinese government, we don't know exactly what they died of.
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That's been the problem in searching for other origins of COVID-19. Chinese stonewalling and American butt-covering have made COVID origins far harder to unravel.
National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard is marshalling resources from across the government to turn over every rock and search far and wide for answers to the COVID origins mystery.
Gabbard, like many in the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress, believes the pandemic was caused by a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, rather than by the virus spilling over from animals to people, as many virologists say is more likely.
The administration last month launched a web page making the case that the pandemic originated in a Chinese lab and accusing former NIH official Anthony Fauci of covering it up.
In her interview with Kelly, Gabbard pointed to NIH grants that went to gain-of-function research to make a case that such research led to the pandemic.
“In the case of the Wuhan lab, as well as many other bio labs around the world, was actually U.S. funded, and leads to this dangerous kind of research that in many examples has resulted in either a pandemic or some other major health crisis,” Gabbard said.
Fauci authorized gain-of-function (he still refuses to refer to the research as "gain of function") research at Wuhan by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. But it's pure speculation to say that Daszak's research was responsible for the pandemic. There's no hard evidence that Daszak's research was the origin of COVID nor is there any hard evidence that Anthony Fauci knew it.
It is, however, intelligent speculation given the third-world safety of Wuhan and the ill-trained lab workers handling these deadly viruses to finger the lab as the likely place where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus escaped into the wild. Can Gabbard and the government find enough evidence to blame China for their terrible management of a lab that handled deadly diseases?
At least we can be assured that, unlike the Biden administration, a supreme effort to find the origins of the pandemic will be made.
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