We Still Don’t Know How COVID Began. That Should Terrify Us. — Newsweek

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

We Still Don’t Know How COVID Began. That Should Terrify Us. — Newsweek | AIPROPX

0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. More than six and a half years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, those of us still trying to determine how and where it began can sometimes feel like Japanese soldiers emerging from remote Pacific islands decades after World War II, unaware that the rest of the world has moved on. But the world should not move on.

A bipartisan Heritage Foundation commission—on which I served as the lead Democrat—estimated 28 million excess deaths globally and more than $18 trillion in economic losses in the United States alone as a result of the pandemic. Getting to the bottom of how this catastrophe began is not about relitigating the past, but about doing everything possible to prevent an even worse pandemic in the future.

That is why, as someone who has been publicly calling for a comprehensive investigation into the origins of Covid since early 2020, I welcomed Senator Rand Paul’s decision to hold a Senate hearing on Wednesday focused on the issue. Unfortunately, the hearing quickly became the latest battle in the long-running war between Senator Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Dr. Fauci, who had been subpoenaed, invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and declined to answer more than 100 questions while Senator Paul repeatedly threatened contempt proceedings. The result was social media-ready political theater and little progress toward answering the most essential questions.

That is a shame because we still have a great deal of work to do.

Dr. Fauci’s decades of leadership on HIV/AIDS, vaccines and other public health challenges helped save millions of lives, but that extraordinary record does not place every decision he made beyond scrutiny. Years before Covid, Dr. Fauci and others argued that experiments making potentially dangerous viruses more transmissible could help scientists anticipate future threats and develop countermeasures. They were not oblivious to the risks. In 2011, Dr. Fauci and then-NIH director Francis Collins specifically warned about accidental release and emphasized that such work needed to be done in high-security laboratories with tightly controlled access. The following year, Dr. Fauci argued that the benefits of such research outweighed the risks.

The problem was what happened as this model expanded globally. The United States provided a relatively small amount of funding connected to research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth Alliance. The work explicitly authorized under those grants could not, by itself, have produced SARS-CoV-2. But money is fungible. More fundamentally, American taxpayer dollars were supporting research at an institution where we lacked sufficient transparency into what research was being done, by whom and under what conditions.

I also believe Dr. Fauci was wrong to speak so confidently in the early months of the pandemic about the evidence favoring a natural origin. In May 2020, he said the scientific evidence was “very, very strongly leaning” toward the conclusion that the virus had not been artificially manipulated and that its evolution “strongly indicates” it had evolved in nature and then jumped species. At that point, no one outside China had enough reliable information to reach such a confident conclusion about how the pandemic began. That was precisely why I was calling then for all credible hypotheses, including a research-related incident, to be investigated aggressively.

But turning the origins question into a referendum on Anthony Fauci misses the bigger story—in a dangerous way.

Whether you believe, as I do, that the evidence points toward a research-related incident followed by a criminal Chinese government cover-up, or that the virus jumped from an animal to a human through the wildlife trade followed by a criminal Chinese government cover-up, the road leads back to China. But for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there may well have been no pandemic at all.

None of this definitively proves a research-related origin, but, taken together, I believe it makes that hypothesis by far the most compelling explanation of the available evidence.

Last year, the WHO reported that China had still not provided hundreds of early viral sequences, detailed information about animals sold in Wuhan markets, or information about research and biosafety conditions at Wuhan laboratories.

Holding China accountable, however, cannot mean giving ourselves a pass, and scrutiny is not vilification. Dr. Fauci does not deserve the abuse and threats directed against him. He does deserve, like every official involved in the pandemic response, to answer legitimate questions about decisions that may have been mistaken. Invoking the Fifth Amendment is a constitutional right, not an admission of guilt. Given the threats of prosecution he has faced, I understand why he did so Wednesday. I also understand why Americans seeking answers would find his refusal deeply frustrating.

That is precisely the problem. Six years of partisan warfare have left us with one side seemingly determined to prosecute Dr. Fauci and the other often more interested in defending him. Neither approach is getting us the answers we need. And while we fight among ourselves, China escapes the scrutiny it deserves.

Since August 2020, I have called for a bipartisan national Covid commission modeled on the 9/11 Commission. It should have respected Democratic and Republican leadership, subpoena power and a mandate to examine the entire catastrophe: how the pandemic began; China’s actions and obstruction; U.S. funding of research overseas; biosafety and biosecurity; intelligence and public health failures; and what we must do differently next time.

No nation, institution, or person should be above scrutiny, and no conclusion should be decided in advance. We need to turn over every stone and f...