Is Congress finally getting serious about investigating Covid’s origins?

Wednesday’s hearing on the origin of Covid-19 by the select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic was long overdue. It has been more than three years since the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2, was first detected in Wuhan, China. Yet far too little has been done in the United States to find out how the pandemic started.

Separate investigations by US intelligence agencies have led to one assessment of a lab leak with moderate confidence by the FBI, a scattering of low-confidence assessments — the Department of Energy leans toward a lab origin while four agencies lean toward a natural origin — and two agencies undecided. What is clear is that a bipartisan and systematic investigation of both natural and lab origin hypotheses is urgently needed to find credible and high-quality evidence that can help us reach an assessment of high confidence.

Every person who spoke at the hearing affirmed that it is important to find the origin of Covid-19 to prevent future pandemics and that an objective investigation would be best while keeping an open mind to both natural and lab origin hypotheses. It is therefore incomprehensible that no bipartisan or Democrat-led investigation was initiated in the last three years. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an American physician and former director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, lamented that her Democrat counterparts had not participated in meetings to look at the origin of Covid-19 starting in 2021. There is an opportunity now for the Senate to launch a bipartisan investigation but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said they are still waiting to see the results of the Biden administration’s inquiry — no estimated date was provided, meaning it could be this year or perhaps a century from now.

It is disheartening that putting people over politics and science over conspiracy has come to mean such different things to members from each party. On the Republican side, there is an undeniable keenness to hold accountable scientific and public health leaders who acted in ways that suppressed the lab leak theory. On the Democratic side, there are concerns that an inquiry into these leaders will not be evenhanded and that this will encourage conspiracy theories and deepen the distrust in science, public health, and vaccines.

Much of the hearing was spent not on identifying ways to obtain key evidence relating to the origin of the pandemic, but on discrediting each party’s motives and witnesses. Watchers of the hearing might well have come away believing that the entire affair was not about finding out how the pandemic started but about the unrelated wrongdoings of one of the Republican-picked witnesses, Nicholas Wade. Why didn’t the Democrats request his removal in a timely fashion when his name was shared with them a week before the hearing? This article will not be similarly derailed by Wade’s controversial writings.

Meanwhile, the witness selected by the Democrats was unaware of public facts such as how quickly intermediate hosts were found in the SARS outbreaks two decades ago despite much less advanced technology and expertise — infected civet cats were found at a local market less than three months after isolating the virus from a patient in 2003 and infected civets again were found at the workplace of an early case less than a week after the patient was diagnosed in 2004. We are now more than three years out and no intermediate host has been identified for this pandemic.

No one is served — and no pandemic is prevented — by this drama and lack of focus on the matter at hand.

If this subcommittee’s investigation is the only origin of Covid-19 investigation the world gets, that means that there is only a year and a half left at best to find key evidence here in the United States that can tell us how the pandemic started in Wuhan. There is no question that scientists have been discouraged and prevented from publicly raising the possibility that the virus came from a lab. It is a victory that, today, both parties say that we must investigate both natural and lab hypotheses. The Democrats say even Dr. Anthony Fauci is keeping an open mind, and Dr. Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last November that, “maybe there’s a lab leak but it’s not with the viruses that the NIH was funding. That’s almost certain that that’s the case.” However, if this investigation concludes with zero new concrete evidence pointing toward a natural or lab origin, it will have played directly into the hands of those seeking to shut down scientific debate and ensure that we never find the truth. We cannot waste any more time on unproductive hearings and witnesses who cannot provide more insight into the early days of the pandemic and the events leading up to the pandemic.

The next hearings must call on experts and witnesses who can tell us reliably about when they heard news of a novel contagion spreading through Wuhan. According to one expert, American doctors were visiting a Wuhan hospital by chance and became aware of an outbreak of uncharacterized pneumonia in mid-December 2019. It was reported that US intelligence officials were warning of a contagion in Wuhan as early as November 2019. These are incompatible with the most prominent natural origin hypothesis which asserts that the first infected human case only occurred in November with few cases and hospitalizations occurring through mid-December.

The next hearings must call on collaborators and funders of the Wuhan scientists who have communications and documents relating to the virus research happening in Wuhan. A damning 2018 research proposal co-written by Wuhan and American scientists was unearthed in 2021. This document laid out a detailed experimental plan that has been described as “about as close as you can get to a recipe for creating SARS-CoV-2”. Since this plan was conceived jointly with American scientists, there is surely more information here in the United States about this research and what might have happened in the Wuhan lab.

The origin of a pandemic virus that has taken more than a million American lives cannot be allowed to become a political football.