Why did so many of our scientific “experts” outright reject the possibility that COVID-19 could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology when there was plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction? Because they were tied up in the very research that may have produced the coronavirus, and they didn’t want anyone to know about it.
That is, essentially, the crux of a recent in-depth report by Vanity Fair that details how serious conflicts of interest have prevented the scientific community and the federal government from getting to the bottom of the coronavirus’s origins.
A couple of Vanity Fair’s findings are worth noting:
Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”
And:
The report also includes an interesting detail about Peter Daszak, the president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which directed U.S. federal grants to the WIV. In February 2020, Daszak organized an influential letter signed by dozens of scientists that dismissed the lab-leak theory as xenophobic nonsense. According to Vanity Fair, Daszak intentionally tried to hide his role in organizing the letter so that his connection to the WIV wouldn’t come under scrutiny:
Daszak did end up signing the letter, which ended with this statement: “We declare no competing interests.”
In the meantime, government officials were busy collecting evidence that established the credibility of the lab leak theory. Much of this evidence has been public knowledge for a while: In 2018, State Department officials were made aware of the WIV’s unsafe lab practices and the public health threat that they posed. In late 2020, government officials discovered three of the WIV researchers connected to the lab’s gain-of-function experiments had fallen ill with symptoms similar to COVID-19 in 2019.
Despite this, it took months for the scientific community to treat the lab leak theory like a credible possibility. It wasn’t until Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist, published a lengthy essay last month that evaluated the evidence for both theories that experts were forced to admit natural emergence wasn’t the only possibility.
But Wade didn’t provide any new evidence. All he did was lay out the facts.
However, those facts were so damning that the lab leak theory became impossible to ignore. Why had the WIV tested novel coronaviruses on humanized mice to gauge their infectiousness? Why were WIV technicians performing these experiments in a facility that lacked the proper equipment? And most importantly, why were U.S. scientists involved in this research at all when they knew it wasn’t safe?
It’s easy to see why the experts involved in this research wouldn’t want it to come to light. Because if the lab leak theory is proven true, they will be just as responsible for the pandemic as China — and they know it.
