By Dan Murphy
Over the past weekend (March 26-28), several members of the American medical and scientific community came out to question why, one year after COVID-19 came to the United States and killed 551,000 Americans, we still do not know with certainty where the virus originated from.
“It’s crazy that a year into this, there is no full investigation into the origins of the pandemic.”
Jamie Metzl, Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council & author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity
On Sunday March 28, in interviews on 60 Minutes and during a CNN special on COVID-19, Americans heard from experts and leaders in the fields disease control and virology, who now feel comfortable expressing their views about what we still don’t know about the coronavirus.
On 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl interviewed Jamie Metzl, a former NSC official in the Clinton administration and member of a WHO advisory committee on genetic engineering. Metzl said that the WHO’s so called ‘investigation’ of the origins of the Coronavirus in Wuhan was nothing more than “a highly-chaperoned, highly-curated study tour…This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see.”
Metzl also questions how coincidental it is for COVID-19 to originate in a live food market in Wuhan, which also has “China’s level four virology institute, with probably the world’s largest collection of bat viruses, including bat coronaviruses…To quote Humphrey Bogart, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why Wuhan?”
Stahl also asked Metzl why the WHO wasn’t able to conduct their own investigation and take samples from the virology lab. “While they were there they didn’t demand access to the records and samples and key personnel. That’s because of the ground rules China set with the WHO, which has never had the authority to make demands or enforce international protocols…On top of that, the WHO agreed that in most instances China would do the primary investigation. And then just share its findings..So these international experts weren’t allowed to do their own primary investigation…Imagine if we have asked the Soviet Union to do a co-investigation of Chernobyl. It doesn’t really make sense.”
Metzl added that “China had ruled out a lab accident long before the WHO team arrived at the airport in Wuhan on January 14 and were greeted by people in full PPE gear. The (WHO) team included some of the world’s leading experts on how viruses are transmitted from animals to humans. But even though there have been accidental lab leaks of viruses in China in the past that have infected people and killed at least one, no one on the team was trained in how to formally investigate a lab leak. After a two-week quarantine in China, “they (WHO) had some tense exchanges with their counterparts, a team of chinese experts, over their refusal to provide raw data.”
On CNN, Dr. Sanjay Gupta held a discussion with the United States greatest minds on disease control, virology and medicine to discuss what happened over the past year. One of the biggest media takeaways from the special, called COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out, came from Robert Redfield, the former Director of the Centers for Disease Control under former President Trump, who said, , “I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory — escaped. Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.”
Redfield added “I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human. And at that moment in time, the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human to human transmission. That’s my own view. It’s only an opinion. I’m allowed to have opinions now,” said Redfield, who served as the CDC director from 2018 until former President Donald Trump left office.
Over the past year, the voice of reason for the American people has been Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci was also interviewed by Sanjay Gupta, and while he disagreed with Redfield’s assumption about where the virus came from, he was critical about the lack of information coming from China about the virus from day one.
When asked by Gupta about the lack of transparency coming from China, Fauci said, “I always had skepticism about it because of what we went through with SARS… the Chinese are saying, ‘oh, it’s flu, it’s flu’ and then the next thing you know, that SARS was all over the world in Canada and Australia, all over the place. So they are not very transparent in the past. It wasn’t outright lying, they just didn’t give you all the information.”
On March 4, more than two dozen experts, including Metzl and virologists, signed an open letter calling for a new international investigation, this time with a scientific team that has the power “to carry out a full and unrestricted investigation,” and to specifically look into if the outbreak occurred as a result of a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the city where the first outbreak occurred.
“ Based on our analysis, and as confirmed by the global study convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese authorities, there is as yet no evidence demonstrating a fully natural origin of this virus.–… With more than two million deaths, more than a hundred million infected by COVID-19 worldwide, and a massive global disruption impacting some of the world’s most vulnerable populations, we cannot afford an investigation into the origins of the pandemic that is anything less than absolutely thorough and credible. If we fail to fully and courageously examine the origins of this pandemic, we risk being unprepared for a potentially worse pandemic in the future. Because we believe the joint team process and efforts to date do not constitute a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation, we call on the international community to put in place a structure and process that does,” states the letter, signed by 26 Doctors and Virologists across the world.
While there has been no evidence pointing to a leak at the Wuhan Virology lab (primarily because no data has been allowed to be released to the public), there also has been no data or evidence pointing the theory that the virus was spread as a result of transmission from a bat in a live food market. Anthony Regalado, in the MIT Technology Review, writes, “This time, though, the intermediate-host hypothesis has one big problem. More than a year after covid-19 began, no food animal has been identified as a reservoir for the pandemic virus. That’s despite efforts by China to test tens of thousands of animals, including pigs, goats, and geese, according to Liang Wannian, who leads the Chinese side of the research team. No one has found a “direct progenitor” of the virus, he says, and therefore the pandemic “remains an unsolved mystery.”
Another possibility under consideration is that the virus may have reached Wuhan on a frozen food shipment that included a frozen wild animal. This theory would mean that the virus could have originated somewhere else in the world and was shipped into China. This theory also has no credible evidence to support its conclusion.
Most American scientists and biologists were unwilling to speak out during the Trump administration for fears of being associated with a President who was calling the virus the ‘Kung Flu’. But now with Trump out of office and gone from the public stage, the medical and scientific community want what they have based their professional lives on: proven and credible data, test results to base a determination on what really happened in Wuhan.
David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, says a lab leak was never the subject of a “fair and dispassionate discussion of the facts as we know them.” Relman also offers a warning about what could happen if we don’t get the data from China. “We need a much better sense about where to place our resources and effort. This is why the origins question is so important.” And why uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic, writes Charles Schmidt, in the MIT -Tech Review.
Alison Young, an Opinion contributor for USA Today, writes, “Let me be clear: Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor.”
This is no longer about former President Trump and his accusations against the Chinese Communist Party, CCP. This is about the 551,000 dead Americans and the search for truth.
Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, correctly points out that “The United States must compete with China and confront the Chinese government on a range of issues while simultaneously combating the rise of anti-Asian racism at home. These two missions are not at odds with each other, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would have you believe. In fact, they must go hand in hand.”
The WHO is expected to release their report on the virus this week. That is the reason why so many members of the scientific community have come out before its release. The WHO report is almost a ‘nothing burger’ before its release, because of its lack of evidence to support any conclusion with scientific certainty.
With a majority of Americans polled finding that China is our country’s greatest threat (63% Gallup Poll) and that China poses an economic threat to future generations, and with a bi partisan consensus in Congress that something must be done in regards to China, the Biden administration is also looking for answers on COVID-19.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, said “There’s no doubt that especially when COVID-19 first hit, but even today, China is falling far short of the mark when it comes to providing the information necessary to the international community, making sure that experts have access to China. All of that lack of transparency, that lack of being forthcoming is a profound problem.”
For the families of the 551,000 Americans who died from COVID over the last year, don’t we all deserve an answer? “It’s crazy that a year into this, there is no full investigation into the origins of the pandemic.” Said Metzl.
