As the Covid Emergency Ends, We Must Guard against the Threat of Future Lab Leaks

T oday, after more than three years of public-health turmoil, President Joe Biden will end the Covid pandemic emergencies as Covid enters the endemic stage.

Other losses aside, more than 1.1 million Americans have died of this pandemic, a higher death toll than total American casualties in World War II. Globally, the number is around 7 million, upward of 20 million including excess deaths (i.e., those that can be plausibly inferred as linked to Covid). To prevent future disasters, we must ascertain the origin of this pandemic. That is also a moral obligation that we, the living, owe to the millions perished.

There are two viable origin hypotheses: (1) zoonotic spillover at the Wuhan Huanan seafood market where wildlife was sold; (2) accidental leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology facilities that were conducting gain-of-function (GoF) experiments with unpublished novel coronaviruses at low-biosafety conditions. In an ideal world, transparent and independent investigations should have taken place immediately following both hypotheses.

On the surface, it can seem that the Chinese government has left no stones unturned; its scientists have sampled from the seafood market and searched nearby animal farms. But the Chinese military placed the WIV under military control and removed its virus database. Instead of sharing investigative results, Beijing decided to push the propaganda that Covid was imported into Wuhan via the frozen-food supply chain, and the real origin was associated with the labs of the U.S. Army research center and a U.S. virologist, Ralph Baric. So Beijing is fine with the lab-leak theory — if the lab in question isn’t in Wuhan.

This propaganda was also a not-so-subtle warning shot from Beijing about the involvement of the U.S. government: Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak (head of U.S.-based Ecohealth Alliance), were listed as WIV collaborators in a 2018 grant proposal to do GoF experiments. Chances are, both governments knew the lab-leaked origin of Covid but neither is willing to take the blame.

The mainstream media (MSM) largely labeled the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory, even a racist one. In doing so, they forget the 2014 Obama moratorium on GoF research, as well as numerous documented lab accidents worldwide. GoF experiments alter viruses to make them more deadly or transmissible, but associated risks were never fully transparently assessed or communicated to the public. And a rash of biosafety issues such as lab leaks involving deadly pathogens pushed the Obama administration to issue the GoF moratorium in the first place.

Given the egregious coverage of the Covid origin by the MSM, a group of scientists founded a nonprofit named Biosafety Now to bring attention to this existential risk. Only recently could the lab-leak theory be discussed with reasonable objectivity, after the Department of Energy (DoE) shifted its assessment toward a lab origin, and the FBI publicly stated its “moderate confidence” in this explanation. Despite this, many Democrats continue to dismiss the DoE’s positional shift, as well as documented conflicts of interest from National Institutes of Health (NIH) leadership and a selective group of American GoF virologists.

After the DoE disclosure, both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed bills unanimously ordering the declassification of intelligence about the origins of Covid. On March 20, President Biden signed the bill into law, stating the need “to get to the bottom of Covid-19’s origins . . .  including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Whether the probability of a lab leak is 10 percent or — as backed up by the latest full Senate report — closer to 90 percent, it is unfathomable that some leading Democrats won’t follow Obama’s prior leadership in handling GoF experiments and biosafety. These risks are at least as existential to humanity as climate change. Many took a stand opposing the lab-leak hypothesis only because former president Donald Trump believed it. This is faulty logic. If Trump had said that Earth is round, must Democrats become flat-earthers?

In late March, the New York Times finally published an op-ed titled “Dr. Fauci Could Have Said a Lot More,” pointing out the conflicts of interest and possible malfeasance by Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), NIH leadership, and GoF virologists in their assessment of Covid’s origins. The persistent anti-Trump animus of many Democrats does not excuse ignorance of the fact that former NIH director Francis Collins and other prominent officials: Fauci, in 2016 (probably in 2014, too) recklessly expanded and outsourced dangerous GoF research — with no regulatory oversight — to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, through EcoHealth.

Those who shrug their shoulders and declare that “we don’t need to know,” “we may never know,” or “we don’t care about Covid’s origin,” only hurt the very people they claim to represent. CDC data show that minorities suffered higher rates of Covid death as well as hospitalization. People of color are more likely to be frontline workers who rely on public transportation and live in dense urban spaces, and they are thus at higher risk of Covid exposures. It is exactly the kind of systemic discrimination toward lower-income groups that Democrats vow to fight.

The lasting harm of the Covid pandemic goes far beyond the lives lost. For example, remote learning disproportionally harmed lower-income children. Years of education were lost; student math and reading skills are at their lowest point in decades. This will have an immense long-term effect, especially for disadvantaged youth, thus deepening social inequality.

One excuse used by some Democrats is to conflate the Covid-origin inquiry with pandemic responses. These two are separate issues, and both must be assessed independently and apolitically to better prepare us for the future. To the surprise of many, the Biden administration rejected such an independent commission. Some suspect that the rejection was politically motivated because the origin investigation could open up “a can of worms” about U.S. government fundings for GoF research, with taxpayer dollars ending up at Wuhan labs.

The question of Covid’s origin threatens to destroy Democratic rationality and logic. It is an intellectual meltdown of gigantic proportion. The longer it persists, the greater damage it will do to other causes championed by Democrats, such as combating climate change and promoting childhood vaccines. If Democrats want to retain the scientific high ground, then they must be consistent in following scientific methods, carefully guarding scientific integrity, and judiciously avoiding blind trust in scientists with conflicts of interest, such as Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak.

In the aftermath of the spread of Covid-19, GoF virologists with conflicts of interest circled the wagon to protect their territory and placed self-interest above the public good. Their gaslighting during the pandemic clearly demonstrated that they are just another lobbying group with shiny white lab coats. Therefore, they must not dictate the terms of reform when it comes to dangerous GoF research. After all the controversy over GoF research on the Covid-19 virus, and as the controversy grew hot, NIH issued a statement in May 2021 declaring that it wouldn’t support such work. But earlier this month NIH renewed a grant to EcoHealth Alliance for controversial coronavirus GoF research.

Pleas to let such research continue heedlessly should be ignored; the rest of us must think of how best to prevent the sort of viral nightmare they likely unleashed. People around the world deserve a thorough investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. China should not be an excuse — much can be investigated even without China’s cooperation — and the investigation should begin in America. And it’s time to ban GoF research. One lab-generated pandemic is one too many.

Jianli Yang, a former political prisoner of China and a Tiananmen Massacre survivor, is the founder and president of Citizen Per 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.