The Journal scoop on Sunday that the US Department of Energy has concluded that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, doesn’t mean the case is definitive.
But it is more evidence that the media and public-health groupthink about Covid was mistaken and destructive.
The salient detail is that DOE’s judgment is based on “new” but still secret intelligence. Yet DOE’s new judgment is nonetheless made with “low confidence.”
The FBI has concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the “likely” origin of the virus, but other U.S. intelligence agencies either don’t believe they have enough evidence or believe it had a natural origin.
China has covered up whatever evidence it has about the virus’s origin, and it refuses to let the World Health Organisation conduct a more thorough probe than it did in 2021.
News reports say the WHO recently abandoned the second phase of its investigation. China’s behaviour is prima facie evidence that it fears what an independent inquiry might find.
House Republicans are moving ahead with their own investigation and are pressing the Biden Administration for more detail about what it knows.
That may explain the timing and perhaps the impetus of the leak about the DOE judgment. It’s another notable example of how the change in House control is countering media and government conformity.
On April 22, 2020, we published Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s op-ed pointing to the possibility of the lab leak and raising doubts about Beijing’s claim that it had originated in an animal “wet market.”
The media conformity caucus immediately derided Mr. Cotton for peddling a “conspiracy theory” that had been “debunked,” as the Washington Post put it at the time.
We have since learned that public-health officials wanted to hide that U.S. financial aid to the Wuhan lab may have contributed to the “gain-of-function” research that could have led to the leak.
It is a disgraceful episode, like so much of the initial Covid dogma.
Given China’s cover-up, we may never know for sure how the virus first struck humans. But Americans deserve to know the facts about the relationship of the U.S. National Institutes of Health to the Wuhan lab and to promoting gain-of-function research.
The early deception also needs to be exposed.
The Wall Street Journal
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