The US Department of Energy’s estimate of “low certainty” that Covid-19 likely originated from a leak from a lab in China did little to resolve the thorny issue of where Covid came from.. FBI Director Christopher Wray’s subsequent comments on Fox News that Covid-19 likely originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab added to the furore.
There are already signs that this statement will be used by the Republicans to raise the bar in their war of words with China and heat up already tense relations between the major powers.
The verdict also shocked American conspiracy theorists. “School closures were an unfortunate and disastrous policy. Masks are ineffective. And harmful,” reads the tweet, which has been read nearly 300,000 times since Sunday. “Covid came out of the lab. Everything we skeptics said was true.”
From the beginning, the pandemic has been a political and geopolitical issue, as well as a global public health crisis.
Donald Trump and his staunch supporters, as part of their xenophobic campaign against Beijing, have encouraged the speculation that the pandemic was caused by a covert leak based on scant evidence. Many believed that this was done to divert attention from how the then US president was handling the pandemic poorly at home.
The lab escape theory gained credibility in May 2021, when a US intelligence report said that in November 2019, three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology became so ill that they required hospital treatment. The first cases of Covid-19 were reported at the end of December 2019 in a central Chinese city where a laboratory specializing in coronavirus research is located.
Picking up on the news, Mike Pompeo, who was Trump’s aggressive secretary of state, said “all evidence points to a coronavirus leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” adding that the Chinese Communist Party should be arrested. responsible”.
At the time, President Joe Biden said there was not enough evidence to decide which of the two theories was correct. He said two agencies leaned toward the animal connection and another toward the laboratory theory, “each with low to moderate confidence.” Remarkably, he added, given the Chinese government’s refusal to cooperate fully with international investigators, a definitive conclusion may never be reached.
In March 2021, a team of WHO researchers announced that it would withdraw its interim report on the origin of the virus after Chinese officials repeatedly obstructed a fact-finding mission in Wuhan.
This lack of cooperation backfired on Beijing. That same week, two dozen scientists from the US, UK, France and Australia filed an open letter for a new international study. They said that WHO researchers have such limited access to the resources they need that it is “virtually impossible” to conclude with certainty that the virus did not originate in a Chinese lab.
Fast forward to March 2023, with the Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives – and key investigative committees – the Energy Department’s announcement is already being used as a political weapon – nominally to warn Americans of the dangers posed by the Chinese Communist Party. go out. In fact, the Republican Party’s direct target is the Biden administration, which it is trying to accuse of being soft on China without sufficient evidence.
However, scientists agree that determining the origin of the virus is critical. “Knowing the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is essential to understanding where and how this virus originated and what we need to do to prevent future pandemics,” said Lawrence Young, a virologist and professor of molecular oncology at the University of Warwick School of Medicine.
However, a little knowledge can be dangerous. The idea of what could follow came Monday from Republican Senator Roger Marshall, who backs the lab leak hypothesis and who, like many on the Republican right, wants the Senate to investigate President Anthony Fauci, Covid Czar Biden.
“This gives us momentum to uncover the true origin of Covid,” Marshall said. “As a doctor and student of biochemistry, I think that this virus simply cannot occur in nature. It’s too perfect.”
The real experts disagree. Jonathan Stoy, a retrovirus specialist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, believes that the observed mutation rate in Sars-Cov-2 contradicts the lab escape theory. He found that by 2021 there will be 1,000 differences in nucleotide order — the building blocks of genes — between Sars-Cov-2 and its most famous viral relative, RaTG13.
“Given the rate of nucleotide change observed in the spread of the virus among humans, it seems extremely unlikely, if not impossible, that changes spanning such an evolutionary path could have occurred in the laboratory during the growth of the virus,” he said. He concluded that “it is highly likely that a direct ancestor of Sars-Cov-2 exists in the wild and can still be found.”
Professor Stop said I on Tuesday: “As far as I can tell, no new evidence has been released to support the FBI’s claim. In the absence of such information, I am not inclined to change my opinion that the available evidence supports the natural origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. Pointing the finger without providing evidence is very useless and greatly complicates international efforts to provide a definitive account of the events that led to the first human infections.”
Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, who specializes in studying the causes of infectious disease outbreaks, agrees. He says that despite the recent intervention by the Department of Energy, “the possibility strongly points to a leak from the lab and a link to the Huanan (Wuhan) fish market.”
However, some Republicans in Congress may be holding their teeth. Brad Wenstrup, who sits on a special subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, and James Comer, chairman of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, demanded that the Department of Energy provide all evidence to cover up the role of the Chinese Communist Party in covering up the truth. regarding the first outbreak.
Most scientific experts doubt that the virus came from a Chinese laboratory. They say investigating the lab leak theory is warranted, but it should be done by scientists, not politicians.
‘This last [energy department]The media cycle that was created is another reminder of how inconsistent the debate with scientific evidence is,” Michael Sparrow, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, told me. Washington Post. He was an early proponent of the leak theory before a slew of peer-reviewed papers convinced him that the virus likely originated in the wild and spread among people from Wuhan’s wet market.
At the moment, this theory seems the most likely. But doubts will remain – not least because the Chinese government is so reluctant to shed light on one of the major public health issues of our time – and the pandemic’s political fallout will linger.
Source: I News
I am Michael Melvin, an experienced news writer with a passion for uncovering stories and bringing them to the public. I have been working in the news industry for over five years now, and my work has been published on multiple websites. As an author at 24 News Reporters, I cover world section of current events stories that are both informative and captivating to read.