From Undark, December 22:
China may be blocking access to ground zero, but there is evidence to uncover elsewhere — if only more people would try.
The origin of Covid-19 remains a subject of intense public interest, and it hinges on two main hypotheses: One holds that the virus developed naturally among wild animals and spilled over into people, most likely through a wildlife market in Wuhan, China. The other posits that the virus came by way of an accidental exposure during fieldwork or a leak from a virology lab in the same city, known for conducting extensive and, many say, risky experiments on novel coronaviruses from wild animals.
Figuring out which hypothesis is true is of utmost importance, given the pandemic’s toll. The U.S. alone has suffered more than a million Covid-19 deaths and hundreds of millions of infections, leaving many struggling with long Covid and pandemic-related mental health problems. Experts have estimated that Covid-19 will cost the U.S. $16 trillion — nearly half of its national debt for context. In light of all this, one would expect an army of investigative journalists to be digging for the truth, and a bipartisan commission with subpoena powers to be in full force to find the origin of Covid-19.
To date, neither have really happened. The New York Times reported last year that the White House privately opposed forming such a commission despite appeals by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray. And this year, the Director of National Intelligence failed to release classified intelligence potentially linking the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the origin of Covid-19 — in spite of a bill passed unanimously in both the Senate and House and signed into law by President Biden. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington and the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair, called this “a slap in the face of Americans who deserve full transparency about what information the government possesses regarding the origins of COVID-19.”
China’s refusal to allow access to the Wuhan laboratory and other key pieces of information has made a full investigation nearly impossible. However, the coronavirus research in Wuhan was part of a U.S.-China collaboration, suggesting that there are tranches of evidence to be explored here at home. And yet, as journalist Katherine Eban recently wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, most news outlets have avoided truly digging into this evidence.
“The story is toxic to most news outlets due to (false) claims that it’s somehow right-wing/anti-science to investigate how upwards of 10-million people died,” wrote Eban, who is among the few journalists who have given the lab leak hypothesis a serious look. “Only a small band of journos continues to actually report.”
Most notably, in 2021, a group of amateur online sleuths known at the time as Drastic obtained a research proposal written by U.S. and Wuhan scientists and submitted to a Department of Defense agency in 2018. The proposal detailed plans to grow or synthesize novel SARS-like coronaviruses from bats, and to test these on human airway cells and humanized mice — models for human SARS infection. The proposal shows that the scientists specifically wanted to bring novel SARS-like coronaviruses collected in nature back to the lab and insert a feature called a furin cleavage site, which could alter — and even enhance — a virus’ ability to transmit across species and cause disease.
The Defense Department ultimately rejected that proposal, but the SARS-CoV-2 virus that emerged in Wuhan in late 2019 possessed just such a furin cleavage site — a feature so far not observed in other SARS-like viruses found in nature. To a skeptical observer, it was as if these scientists proposed to put horns on horses and not two years later a unicorn showed up in their city....
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