James Morrow: Of course a global pandemic was released from a place studying diseases

If you really drill down into it, the idea that Covid-19 came out of a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan makes total sense, writes James Morrow.

The most remarkable thing about last night’s Sky News documentary What Really Happened in Wuhan is that it ever needed to be made in the first place, or that the book of the same title ever needed to be written.

When you think about it, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic broke out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the most logical thing in the world.

Think about it.

A once in a lifetime global coronavirus pandemic just happens to emerge … in a city that is home to one of just a handful of so-called BSL-4 laboratories – equipped to handle the worst of the worst type of pathogens in the world?

Medical staff wearing protective clothing arrive with a patient at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital. Picture: AFP

Not only that, a lab whose researchers were so open about the fact that they were playing with bat coronaviruses that they actually went cap in hand to US medical agencies looking for funding?

Yet it is a testament to the ability of Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist Party to smear, deflect, and sow doubt that this perfectly logical idea has created so much controversy.

And it is a shocking indictment of so many in the West, particularly among our so-called “elite”, that for over a year, to voice support for the lab leak hypothesis was, in certain circles, about as big a faux pas as being an atheist gay in Kabul.

When Sharri Markson first began reporting on it for The Daily Telegraph, she was subjected to a withering campaign attempting to debunk her reporting.

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, in Sky News' What Really Happened In Wuhan documentary. Picture: Supplied

ABC’s Media Watch devoted multiple episodes to the subject.

She was up against a wall of disinformation that led to medical journals such as The Lancet, as well as big tech giants, all working to shut down any discussion that might have reflected poorly on the CCP.

And that’s the important bit.

These communist commissars were more concerned about saving face than saving lives.

Towards the end of What Really Happened in Wuhan, former US secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo summed it up best.

“The thing that the cover-up tells you is the absolute absence of humanity of these leaders,’’ Mr Pompeo said. “They are prepared to let millions of people die if that’s what it takes to protect their regime.”

This is what the world is dealing with. We can learn the lesson now, or later.