The Patriot Post® · Quitting on COVID's Origins

It appears that the medical establishment is either tired of investigating the origins of COVID-19 or simply uninterested in assigning an all-too-obvious blame. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for accountability, and it sends a terrible message to the Communist Chinese: We’re content to let you get away scot-free with having unleashed a global pandemic, having covered it up, and having caused the deaths of nearly five million people worldwide. In our editorial shop, it will always be called the ChiCom Virus!

The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals and therefore one of the organizations that should be most doggedly determined to get to the bottom of this, is leading the way among the abdicators.

What are these people afraid of? Put simply, the truth.

Back in June 2020, The Lancet formed a COVID-19 Commission “to help speed up global, equitable, and lasting solutions to the pandemic.” As the Commission’s website notes, their work is built around four main themes: “recommendations on how to best suppress the epidemic; addressing the humanitarian crises arising from the pandemic; addressing the financial and economic crises resulting from the pandemic; and rebuilding an inclusive, fair, and sustainable world.”

The fourth of these themes seems oddly out of place. It has nothing to do with COVID-19. Instead, the proper fourth theme seems rather obvious — at least to the objective mind: uncovering the origins of this pandemic so as to keep it from ever happening again.

By November 2020, the Commission had created 12 associated task forces, and one of them, “Origins, Early Spread of the Pandemic, and One Health Solutions to Future Pandemic Threats,” seems spot-on. But curiously, there’s now a note just beneath the heading of that particular task force:

In the interest of ensuring the transparency and objectivity of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission report, the Task Force on the Origins, Early Control of the Pandemic, and One Health Solutions has been ended [emphasis ours]. The Commission’s work on these issues will be undertaken by the Commission Secretariat, in consultation with global experts, in advance of the final report.

So much for, in the Commission’s own words, “good governance that builds on public trust.” Instead, The Lancet and its commissioners have punted, have capitulated, have abandoned their work on the fundamental question concerning COVID-19: How did this happen?

More important, why did this task force disband? The Lancet won’t admit it, but it was compromised from the start. How so? Well, before its “origins” task for was even formed, the journal published a statement saying, in part, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

Think about that. These “scientists” were publicly predisposed to a predetermined outcome.

In addition, the Commission appointed EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak to chair that “origins” task force. Daszak, of course, has gone to great lengths to try to dispel the increasingly credible notion that the coronavirus emerged from the Wuhan Virology Lab. And why would he do that? Because it’s since been learned that his New York-based organization sent $3.4 million in National Institutes of Health grants to that same Wuhan lab between 2014 and 2019, according to The Wall Street Journal. Nope, no conflict here. Not coincidentally, Daszak also helped organize the self-serving letter we quoted above — the one calling COVID-19’s lab origin a “conspiracy theory.”

Even the lefties at The Atlantic now seem convinced that Daszak was funding dangerous “gain-of-function” coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab.

As for that “conspiracy theory,” we wrote about it recently, and the commonsense evidence is damning. Here’s how Nicholas Wade, who for 30 years covered science for The New York Times, put it recently: “It’s very hard on the natural emergence scenario to imagine how the virus broke out someplace else, built itself up into a real good human pathogen, and, without infecting anyone else, the guy who was infected jumped on a train to Wuhan, didn’t infect anyone on the train, and it was only when he got to Wuhan that he started spreading. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

We think Daszak and his Lancet ilk doth protest too much. And we think someone — GOP House Intelligence Committee members, perhaps — needs to get to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins.

If not them, who? If not now, when?