JAMES MIEGS: The Likely Lab Leak and the Covid Cassandra.
I thought I was done with writing about Covid-19. But Covid-19 isn’t done with me—or with any of us.
I’m writing this precisely four years after Chinese health officials first announced the emergence of a mysterious new form of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan. “No obvious human-to-human transmission has been observed,” the officials added in that December 30, 2019, release. (Already, the Chinese were lying.) Today, Covid cases are ticking up for the umpteenth time. And documents keep coming to light that expose how American officials and scientists similarly suppressed unsettling facts about the pandemic’s origins.
While the death rate from each new wave of Covid keeps dropping, the disturbing revelations about our public health leaders keep getting worse. In December 2023, a new disclosure revealed how leading U.S. virus experts lobbied to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research at the substandard Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. The latest leak provides yet more evidence that the pandemic likely emerged from a lab experiment gone awry, and that U.S. scientists actively covered up their possible role in that world-historical catastrophe.
After both the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 9/11 attacks, bipartisan commissions were convened to investigate the disasters. Covid has killed more than a million Americans and has cost our economy at least $14 trillion. And yet we see no great urgency to investigate the pandemic’s murky origins or prevent a recurrence. Republicans in Congress continue to hold productive hearings. But, according to the New York Times, the Biden administration is “privately resisting” pressure to create a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic. The press has largely moved on. And the public health officials most deeply involved in the debacle—including Anthony Fauci and his National Institutes of Health (NIH) colleague Francis Collins—continue to tap-dance around the truth, even after leaving their posts.
It’s as if “just about everything has been corrupted by the left” or something.