Top U.S. public health officials and experts are increasingly lending credibility to the need for a deeper investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. Scientists who previously downplayed or dismissed the hypothesis that the virus could have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, are now increasingly saying there is a need for further investigation. Scientists haven’t discovered definitive proof the virus leaked from a lab. But they also have not found hard evidence that shows the virus started in animals before naturally infecting humans, which is why some now argue an investigation is needed
In addition, recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal cited a U.S. intelligence report that several researchers at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with flu-like symptoms in November 2019 — just before the coronavirus began infecting people across China and then the world — and that they required hospitalization. The first confirmed case in Wuhan, according to the Chinese government, was Dec. 8, 2019...
White House medical adviser and top infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci, who downplayed the lab leak theory in the past, recently said he thinks an investigation is warranted. “I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I'm fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China,” Fauci said during a Senate hearing after sparring with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) over the virus's origins...
Earlier this month, a group of 18 leading scientists published a letter in the academic journal Science calling for further investigation into the origin of the virus. The scientists noted that they were not advocating for one possibility over another but that the lack of evidence called into question any existing hypothesis. “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” the scientists wrote...
So what does NSG think?
I think the usually dog and pony media show happened, where we had two equally likely hypothesis, but the media pretended that one was the absolute truth and the other was a raving mad conspiracy theory, so I'm glad that today, more than a year after the fact, real scientists are acknowledging that both theories should be taken seriously.
