Liberal Publications Reopen Door To Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory As Origin For COVID

The “lab leak” theory for the origin of COVID-19 may be a thing again.

On Friday, left-wing media outlets Vanity Fair and ProPublica released a lengthy article detailing a report released by the Republican staff of a U.S. Senate committee that spent months trying to unwind Chinese Communist Party communications about the initial outbreak of the virus.

As Vanity Fair noted, a 35-page summary of the larger, still confidential findings of the GOP staff of the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee “concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was ‘more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident’” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The origin of the virus has been one of the most hotly debated issues of the pandemic. Liberals, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, have generally dismissed evidence that a lab leak caused the pandemic as a conspiracy theory. As recently as June, according to C-SPAN, Fauci told a Senate committee that COVID emerged from a “natural occurrence” instead of a lab leak, and that the “evidence” indicates the virus leapt from “an animal host, perhaps through an intermediary host, into a human species which then spread throughout the human population.”

In the news: Sen. Scott Says With Nearly 2.4 Million Illegal Immigrants DHS Leader Mayorkas Must Resign

Fauci’s critics, like Republican Sen. Rand Paul, have countered that Fauci and others don’t want to acknowledge the leak theory because it would reveal in part that the U.S. government helped finance the “gain of function” research that may have ignited the pandemic.

In its piece Friday, Vanity Fair focuses on the work of Toy Reid, a linguistics expert and Senate staffer who once worked for GOP Sen. Marco Rubio. Reid believes he identified communications between the government-run lab and CCP officials that indicated “hidden safety dangers” at a lab troubled by poor working conditions and inexperienced managers.

Vanity Fair noted that it used its own CCP experts to review Reid’s work and found that the “dispatches” he analyzed “did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues.”

“The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically, or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was” the magazine added.

Curiously, according to Vanity Fair, the Senate report suggests the Chinese military was already working on a COVID vaccine before the news of the virus went public. That indicates those researchers “had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.”

In other words, the CCP knew it had a problem long before it informed the rest of the world.

In the news: Democrat Charlie Crist’s Running Mate Gets Schooled On Florida Gov. DeSantis’ Education Policy

Vanity Fair reported that the Senate staffers admit their own report is not definitive because of the lack of transparency from Chinese officials. But the work of Reid and other researchers led to an assessment that “a lab accident was ‘most likely’ responsible for the pandemic,” Vanity Fair noted.

Quoting the researchers’ report, Vanity Fair notes, “the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt, or the presumption of accuracy.”

Support for that claim is simple, the magazine says. “The available evidence doesn’t fit the patterns of previous outbreaks, including outbreaks of SARS in 2003 and avian influenza in 2013.” As the Senate report itself states, “almost three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, there is still no evidence of an animal infected with SARS-CoV-2, or a closely related virus, before the first publicly reported human COVID-19 cases in Wuhan in December 2019.”

The magazine concluded: “Without the cooperation of China’s government, we can’t know exactly what did or didn’t happen at the WIV, or what precise set of circumstances unleashed SARS-CoV-2. But the dispatches that Reid unearthed, when overlaid with additional evidence the Senate team compiled, point to a catastrophe in the making: political pressure to excel, inadequate resources to safeguard risky work, and an effort to skirt blame once a crisis hit.”

Visit Tampafp.com for Politics, Sports, and National Headlines. Support journalism by clicking here to our GiveSendGo or sign up for our free newsletter by clicking here.

Android Users, Click Here To Download The Free Press App And Never Miss A Story. Follow Us On Facebook Here Or Twitter Here.