Government finagling and misdirecting, especially in crises, are destructive to the long-term public good. And in the end they’re always destructive to personal reputations.
The Journal last Sunday upended an old debate with a big exclusive: The Energy Department has told the White House it believes a lab leak was the most likely source of the Covid-19 pandemic. As reporters
Michael R. Gordon
and
Warren P. Strobel
noted, the department’s new stand is important because it results from new intelligence and because of the agency’s expertise—it oversees a network of labs. Two days later
Christopher Wray,
director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed the FBI’s view that it was “most likely a potential lab incident . . . a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”
News of the virus broke in January 2020, and almost from day one authorities seemed to steer the public away from the obvious. My own thinking was like that of most people: A new viral disease has broken out in Wuhan, China. It turns out China’s major viral laboratory is in . . . Wuhan. If the new virus has been found in the population just outside the lab, chances are good it escaped from it. It probably walked out on someone’s shoe.
Everything in your logic said this—common sense, Occam’s razor.
China denied it. The disease started with bats in caves, it was natural transmission, bats to humans. Or maybe it spread to humans at the crowded local wet market—raw foods, live animals, germs. You likely thought: That’s probably where it spread but not necessarily where it originated. You reserved judgment until the smoke clears.
But you respected your own thinking and it will have bothered you that month by month the highest scientific and medical authorities in the U.S. government seemed to be discouraging the conversation, or insistently directing it toward natural transmission.
Anthony Fauci,
we later found, dismissed the subject in internal emails a few months into the pandemic as a “shiny object that will go away.”
That was rather patronizing. People had a right to wonder and were wise to do so. The disease killed millions. It was a world-wide economic, societal and cultural disaster. Why it happened matters. Where and how it started…
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