Vanity Fair has a long article on the origin of COVID-19 and the political maneuverings surrounding it. Additional documents have surfaced since the virus’s origin first became an issue.
The TL;DR is that there was always substantial doubt from the Virology community about the official zoonotic explanation for its genesis. Substantial efforts from Fauci, Daszak, and others were exerted to shutdown those doubts and to cast the lab leak explanation as an anti-science conspiracy theory.
The picture that emerges is not pretty: it’s of a group of scientists doing everything they could not to find the truth but to suppress it. Daszac, in particular, is portrayed as a lightweight concerned only with the funding and survival of his nonprofit, the EcoHealth Alliance.
Vanity Fair makes the case that the gain of function research going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funded by the EcoHealth Alliance shouldn’t have been happening because of a 7U.S. Government moratorium on such activities. Daszak, however, offered a quibbling argument that the moratorium didn’t apply to his research and his enablers at the National Institutes of Health agreed.
Like other articles about COVID’s origin, Vanity Fair doesn’t reach a conclusion on that. What is clear, though, is that a major cover up took place and is still going on. One doesn’t have to be a cynic to wonder why. As virologist Simon Wain-Hobson put it, “[The group of scientists pushing the claim of natural origin] want to show that virology is not responsible [for causing the pandemic]. That is their agenda.”
Regardless, the major lesson in all this for me is that we have to shut down this dangerous gain of function research before these people manage to kill us all.