![]() The report did not trace Covid cases as far back as experts wanted. Metzl’s help, the group published its views in news outlets around the world.Īround the same time, in March 2021, some virus experts became frustrated by a much-anticipated report on the pandemic’s origins by the World Health Organization and China. The scientists, he said, were having trouble getting letters published in science journals. Metzl joined a small group, organized by French and Belgian scientists, who had said the lab leak hypothesis could not be ruled out. Metzl made the case, he said, “that a research-related origin was a very real possibility.” In December 2020, Jamie Metzl, a biosecurity and technology expert at the Atlantic Council who had worked in the Clinton administration, arranged a private telephone call with Jake Sullivan, the incoming national security adviser. Biden won the 2020 election, some experts who called for a fuller investigation of the lab leak hypothesis saw an opportunity to persuade Democrats to give the idea a closer look. ![]() Those findings reinforced the view from a February 2020 letter in The Lancet in which scientists, worried that lab leak fears threatened data sharing from China, condemned “conspiracy theories” about a lab-related origin. (It did not look closely at whether a scientist collecting or isolating a natural virus could have accidentally released it, a hypothesis for which there remains no direct evidence.) The study also said the virus was unlikely to have evolved in the course of certain laboratory experiments. In a study, they wrote that the virus was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” When they examined data, including on naturally occurring viruses that shared critical features with the new virus, they concluded the opposite. Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that the virus could have been engineered in a lab, but required more study. On Capitol Hill, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, raised the idea in a Senate hearing and on Twitter.Īround that same time, according to emails disclosed later, some American virologists privately told health officials, including Dr. ![]() In Washington’s polarized ecosystem, the notion that the virus could have come from the Wuhan lab was seeping into public debate. ![]() Relman is just one of several researchers and like-minded thinkers who has successfully worked the corridors of power in Washington to force journalists, policymakers and skeptical Democrats to take the lab leak idea seriously. The intense political debate, now in its fourth year, has at times turned scientists into lobbyists, competing for policymakers’ time and favor. Trump to distract from his administration’s failings in containing the spread of the virus. That turned the theory toxic for many Democrats, who viewed it as an effort by Mr. Trump raised it in the early months of the pandemic despite scant evidence supporting it. Some Republicans grew fixated on the idea of a lab leak after former President Donald J. For all the data suggesting that the virus may have jumped into people from wild animals at a Chinese market, conclusive proof remains out of reach, as it does for the competing hypothesis that the virus leaked from a lab.īut the story is also about politics and how both Democrats and Republicans have filtered the available evidence through their partisan lenses. The story of the hunt for Covid’s origin is partly about the stonewalling by China that has left scientists with incomplete evidence, all of it about a virus that is constantly changing.
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