Some will find comfort in Wednesday’s news that Joe Biden has ordered the intelligence community to complete a review of COVID-19’s origins in the next 90 days. They should not. While a U.S.-led inquiry is an improvement on the prior approach of farming out the inquiry to the hopelessly compromised World Health Organization, the new Biden effort smacks of damage control. The choice of investigative tools is aimed at controlling what the public learns and how it is framed, rather than at exposing the truth.
The Lab Holds Its Secrets
If the pandemic was the result of human negligence rather than an uncontrollable act of God, it would be the largest accident in human history. As my colleagues have detailed, more than a few people have feared to follow this to its conclusion, because of where it might lead and who might end up having been right. That goes double if the virus itself was created or enhanced by scientists.
To briefly summarize a much longer story: From the outset, there have been two major theories of how the virus entered the population of Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began. Over a year after COVID-19 turned the entire world upside down, both theories remain just that — unproven hypotheses meant to explain the available circumstantial evidence. But the world deserves to know the whole truth, wherever it leads.
One theory is that the virus has a natural origin: It existed in animals and jumped to humans who came in contact with them. The initial official Chinese Communist Party theory of natural origin was that infection began at the Huanan Seafood Market, a “wet market” in Wuhan, where live wild animals (including bats) were sold for food. The wet-market theory has been decisively disproven, given evidence that the virus was circulating in the population of Wuhan before the outbreak that was traced to the wet market; even Chinese authorities have abandoned it. There is, currently, no evidence identifying an alternative, earlier point of natural origin, nor even a commonly accepted theory of one.
The second theory is the “lab leak” hypothesis. The focus of this theory is the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the pandemic erupted, is known to have been conducting experiments with coronaviruses, and doing so with precautions so lax that outside observers became alarmed. The case for a lab accident, and the stonewalling of the Chinese government that has thus far prevented us from nailing it down, is summarized by Jim Geraghty, who has been all over this story for more than a year. In multiple ways (detailed at great length in a must-read essay by respected science writer Nicholas Wade), the available circumstantial and scientific evidence makes the lab-leak hypothesis very simple, while the natural-origin theory is extraordinarily complicated and improbable. Wade also walks through why the supposed “debunkings” of the lab-origin theory in the spring of 2020 should never have been taken as authoritative or impartial.
As with the natural-origin theory, there are multiple possible ways in which COVID-19 could have made it from a lab to the general population. As Jim also notes, Biden’s statement blurs the lines by suggesting that “human contact with an infected animal” would be classified as something other than “a laboratory accident.” But one of the most likely methods of transmission in a lab accident would be contact between lab workers and infected laboratory animals.
If COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, that raises an additional question: Was the virus in some sense man-made? Wade makes a persuasive case that it was — perhaps not in the sense of being fabricated by humans, but at least in the sense that “gain of function” research on viruses involves accelerating the natural-selection process by repeatedly exposing laboratory animals to a virus to develop its capabilities, and that SARS CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is adapted to humans in ways not present in any coronavirus found in nature.
via nationalreview
We Need Sworn Public Testimony on Corona’s Origins
This article starts with “If the pandemic was the result of human negligence rather than an uncontrollable act of God…”. No matter how you slice the problem, the pandemic had to have been the result of human negligence, otherwise you have to assume God is not in control. The New Testament pretty much states that God only gets involved with us when answering prayers, rather than laying down famine or pestilence at His whim. That will change in the end times, but right now we cause most of our own problems by misapplying the free will He so graciously gave us. Assuming the virus came from the wet market, as originally claimed, there is still plenty of evidence that the Chinese government was negligent in informing the rest of the world in a timely fashion, as well as not locking down travel out of the infected area. If we assume it came from the lab, the same negligence regarding lockdowns and information announcements applies, as well as negligence in the lab. Human negligence may or may not have released the virus, but the pandemic was clearly caused by China not taking proper actions sooner, and that is negligence.