The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 Cannot Stop

T he Covid-19 pandemic recently marked its third year. Life has seemingly returned to normal for people in many countries. But Covid itself lingers. Milder variants with significantly higher lethality rates than the seasonal flu circulate. Long-Covid symptoms still plague those afflicted. The official worldwide Covid death toll tops 6 million, while the excess-death count is above 20 million. Just weeks ago, China abandoned its zero-Covid policy overnight without proper preparation, inducing a catastrophe of millions dead under the Omicron wave, as many elders were not vaccinated. Japan recently recorded a new peak in Covid deaths as of December 2022. To paraphrase Yogi Berra — the pandemic ain’t over until it’s over.

Against this backdrop of human tragedy, a pandemic that not only took human lives but also altered social norms and deepened political fault lines, mainstream media have neither critically covered nor objectively scrutinized the central question regarding the origin of Covid-19. Similarly, national leaders and international agencies have remained callously silent during the most recent summits of the United Nations, G7, and G20 — not a single word about the need to ascertain the origin of this existential risk. In the United States, where the Democratic Party had controlled Congress from 2021 until now, Congress failed to take action, such as issuing subpoenas for relevant U.S.-based research entities that partnered with Wuhan coronavirus labs.

It is the essential duty of the government to find the origin of any major disasters and formulate reforms necessary to prevent future occurrences. Imagine if there had been no government investigation after catastrophes such as the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, or other such disasters. We would have been deprived of essential information to obviate future similar incidents.

Investigating the origin of Covid is a comparably urgent priority. It is a public-health disaster of unfathomable magnitude that has killed 1 million Americans, more than the total American casualties in World War II.

In 2021, President Biden ordered a 90-day intelligence review into the origin of Covid-19, but the process ended inconclusively, even though one federal agency determined, with a moderate level of confidence, that Covid leaked from a lab. This preliminary finding is corroborated by early-2020 internal emails from the U.S. State Department. Given the horrific scale of the social and economic damages caused by Covid, one presumes that the U.S. government would be intent on continuing the origin investigation. However, the Biden administration declined in late 2022 to support an independent, post-9/11-style bipartisan commission on the origin of and response to the pandemic.

This decision, as well as the behavior of congressional Democrats, is difficult to reconcile with President Biden’s statement in 2021 that “our efforts to understand the origins of this pandemic will not rest. We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world, so that we can take every necessary precaution to prevent it from happening again.”

Only one congressional hearing has been held in the past three years regarding the danger of gain-of-function (GoF) research, even though it may have led to the Covid pandemic. Past GoF experiments, which involve deliberately creating stronger viruses for study and future prevention, have resulted in man-made chimeric viruses that are highly potent and transmissible. This hearing was held by the Republican minority, led by Senator Rand Paul. Many Democrats immediately and reflexively dismissed the hearing as a political hit on Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, who had strongly supported risky GoF research for many years.

However, such a dismissal, based on dislike of the messenger and not on facts and details, is unwise politics and unsound science. Republicans and Democrats alike die from Covid. Moreover, it’s not just Republicans who believe Covid likely leaked from a lab, but also a majority of Democratic voters, according to a 2021 poll. As for the science: Circumstantial evidence, accumulated since 2020 (in spite of obstructions by both the Chinese government and U.S.-based entities) points toward an accidental lab leak. Mainstream-media attempts to trumpet false assertions by GoF virologists with clear conflicts of interest don’t keep the natural-origin claim from crumbling under scrutiny. The alleged animal host remains mysteriously elusive. There is no evidence of an infection trail from animal farms to the Wuhan market, no evidence of wildlife traders tested at higher positive rate than the general population, and no evidence of rapid early mutations typical of a zoonotic jump.

Additional misconduct related to the general origin inquiry comes unexpectedly from the anti-scientific behavior of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) leadership, who support GoF research, and a small clique of GoF virologists, some of whom have undisclosed connections to Wuhan labs. Meanwhile, in public, they attack people as conspiracists and racists for merely suggesting the lab-leak possibility. There are many renowned voices outside of the GoF circle who are asking for a real investigation, including Drs. Richard Ebright of Rutgers, Alina Chan of Harvard/MIT, David Relman of Stanford, David Baltimore of Caltech, Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, who leads the Lancet Covid-19 Commission, and many other scientists from multiple countries. These scientists are not right-wing extremists.

The indifference to the origin of Covid from the Democratic side is rather perplexing. After all, Democrats and many on the left are intensely worried about the danger of climate change accelerated by human activity, which they consider an existential threat to mankind. Former vice president Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth detailed this case, though not without some skeptical pushback, which Democrats dismiss.

Now, however, the Democrats are facing their own version of an inconvenient truth: GoF research offers no tangible scientific benefits while risking a pandemic in the event of a lab leak. Moreover, Fauci and GoF virologists seem hell-bent on destroying public trust in science with misleading origin narratives that impede a lab-leak investigation. Their motive is to protect their legacy and maintain research grants, not pursue the public good. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Democratic President Barack Obama banned GoF experiments in 2014.

In recent years, the likelihood of viruses’ escaping from labs has only increased due to a proliferation of research facilities studying dangerous viruses, some of them being GoF viruses in dense-population areas such as Wuhan, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, as well as Boston, Mass., and Raleigh, N.C. Building more labs without proper oversight simply increases the probability of lab leaks. Consequently, when we are debating the creation of man-made GoF viruses that can affect our entire civilization, then, just as with climate change, the world must have a say. This can’t be the exclusive domain of GoF virologists. There is absolutely no reason for Democrats to focus on one existential risk but ignore another. The same goes for Republicans.

Yet there is little evidence that the world is taking this threat seriously. In the recent G7 meeting, climate security was at the top of the agenda, but GoF biosafety was nowhere to be found. Without a real investigation into the origin of Covid, world leaders simply lack urgency to address this issue. The inconvenient truth is that the Covid pandemic has killed millions already while climate change has not. GoF biosafety wasn’t discussed at all at the G20 summit in late 2022, either. In the leaders’ declaration, Covid was mentioned 14 times in the context of vaccines, financial stability, and global supply chains. Even tourism recovery got a full paragraph. However, there was not a single word on the origin of Covid.

President Biden issued determined words in 2021 on the need to discover the origins of Covid-19: “The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them. His statement concludes: “We must have a full and transparent accounting of this global tragedy. Nothing less is acceptable.”

We absolutely agree that nothing less is acceptable, not to the 20 million dead and not to current and future generations. The path forward is for Democrats to join Republicans for an apolitical bipartisan investigation. Nothing less is acceptable.

Jianli Yang is founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China and the author of For Us, The Living: A Journey to Shine the Light on Truth. Austin Lin is a scientist at the State University of New York and a consultant to Citizen Power Initiatives for China