When the World Health Organization team tasked to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic reported its findings in March this year, one of its aims appeared to be to dismiss all speculation
that the virus had been engineered by scientists engaged in “gain-of-function” experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was “extremely unlikely,” the team said, that the virus had leaked from the laboratories in Wuhan.
For as long as Donald Trump was US president, Western liberal media generally refrained from lending credence to the idea of a genetically-engineered pathogen escaping from a Chinese lab. Behind the reticence was the fear that it might energize the conspiracy theories and China-bashing popular among Trump’s populist supporters. The real-life consequences of such beliefs are distressingly mirrored in the racist hate they have spawned against Asians in general.
Some of the signatories were scientists who continued to believe that the novel coronavirus naturally evolved from wildlife, and who thought that retrofitting a virus strain in the lab to become the highly transmissible and deadly SARS-CoV-2 would have been an exceptional achievement in genetic re-engineering. But they were unified in the consensus that the WHO investigation should have included a comprehensive evaluation of biosafety measures at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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