Why We'll Probably Never Know the True Origin of COVID-19

Theories on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, designated COVID-19, break down into two camps. One camp believes the virus was transmitted from animals to humans after someone ("Patient Zero") was exposed to it at a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. When the pandemic began, this was a perfectly reasonable theory to espouse. The SARS virus that killed tens of thousands of people in 2002-2003, a close relative of SARS-CoV-2, was traced to a pair of civets infecting humans.

In fact, this kind of natural transmission of animal-to-human viruses has happened dozens of times in human history. In 2020, scientists had no reason to doubt that COVID-19 was any different. This may still be the answer to COVID's origins.

The second theory emerged when the biological makeup of COVID was closely examined. Some of the virus's attributes appeared to have been, or might have been, manipulated to make SARS-CoV-2 more easily transmissible to humans. So, the second camp suspects a genetically manipulated SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from a lab.

At the Wuhan Institute of Virology ("Wuhan Lab"), an American scientist/entrepreneur named Peter Daszak, founder of EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), was conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. Funded, in part, by the U.S. government, the research was approved by Dr. Antony Fauci, then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Fauci and Daszak deny that the research they were conducting was the dangerous "Gain of Function" kind, in which a scientist attempts to make a virus more transmissible, more deadly, or both. The goal is to develop drugs to treat diseases that haven't emerged yet. By mutating or enhancing a virus in a lab setting, researchers attempt to anticipate how wild viruses might naturally evolve to infect humans or escape immune systems. It also helps researchers pinpoint exactly which genetic sequences control transmissibility, host switching (e.g., bat-to-human), or disease severity.

The manipulation of the bat coronavirus by Daszak's team did not meet the exact scientific definition of "gain-of-function" research, despite the work including many elements of a gain-of-function project. This is what is giving Fauci legal cover.

The Wuhan Lab is just blocks from the wet market where many scientists believe the virus made the leap from animal to human. The biggest problem with zoonotic, or natural, transmission of the virus from animals to humans is that it has been seven years, and scientists have yet to identify the exact species responsible for transmitting the virus to a human host.

The civets responsible for the SARS outbreak in 2002 were identified within a couple of years. The longer it takes to identify the animal responsible for the COVID-19 outbreak, the more likely the lab leak theory becomes.

We have all this evidence for both theories but no smoking gun. Why not?

Stat:

The Chinese government vigorously suppressed information about the epidemic in the first weeks and months. It dragged its feet on alerting the international community to the threat. It frustrated the World Health Organization’s attempts to discover basic facts about the transmissibility of the virus, denying the rest of the world crucial weeks to prepare. And once the virus had escaped China and spread to Europe and then North America, it covered up the initial facts about the epidemic, silenced whistleblowers, and prevented investigations into the origin of the virus by refusing international investigations, locking WHO representatives in their hotel rooms on the specious theory that the virus had been imported from abroad. It then denied international access to scientists in Wuhan, their laboratory records, and the records of local public health authorities. Countries that demanded an open investigation were threatened with economic retaliation.

China's massive bureaucracy tried to hide the pandemic's origins from the leadership. The few whistleblowers were quickly silenced before most of them died from COVID. The cover-up in China had catastrophic consequences for the world. China stonewalled and refused to cooperate with the initial investigations (except the sycophantic WHO and Peter Daszak, who played ball with the Chinese government and accepted at face value everything they said).

After the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s, China promised to be more transparent. It was another lie.

However, 18 years later, confronted by the emergence of the epidemic in Wuhan, the government reverted to type, suppressing information and silencing doctors who sought to alert the authorities and their communities to a respiratory disease that was overwhelming the capacity of hospitals to treat victims. As part of the crackdown, information on who was infected during the first weeks of the epidemic was suppressed and then hidden from view.

Studying those early infections would have been critical and would have settled the argument between zoonotic and lab-leak origins of the virus. Patient Zero's medical history would have been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, and their movements and the people and animals they came in contact with would have pointed scientists toward a probable answer.

Not only that, but understanding how the virus made the leap from animals to humans would help us prevent the next pandemic.

The debate will continue, if only because it is politically profitable to keep it going. Fauci is guilty of many things, but perhaps his biggest sins were in covering up facts and manipulating colleagues to embrace his point of view.

Not very scientific of him.

Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.

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