The ChiCom Virus just sort of went away, didn’t it?

That global pandemic responsible for killing at least 6.5 million people — and, according to other estimates, as many as 26.2 million people — isn’t being talked about much anymore. Why is that? Could it be that the world’s most powerful forces want it that way?

More than a year ago, the evidence that COVID-19 was unleashed on the world by way of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology seemed overwhelming. Heck, we wrote as much at the time.

We even invoked lefty Jon Stewart to call out and roundly ridicule the wet-market dead-enders. Stewart pondered the fact that this novel coronavirus with the remarkable ability to attack the respiratory system of humans just coincidentally happened to break out in the only city in China with a biosafety level 4 virology lab in which they up-engineer coronaviruses to attack the respiratory system of humans.

“What about this, what about this, listen to this,” Stewart frantically suggested to an incredulous Stephen Colbert. “There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean. Or, it’s the f***ing chocolate factory!”

And yet currently, we seem to be at a stalemate between that once iron-clad lab-leak theory and an always dubious natural-occurrence theory — that it came from a wet market in Wuhan. How can that be?

A plausible alternative to the lab-leak theory seems, well, implausible. As Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, reminds us: “Pandemic caused by a bat SARS-like coronavirus emerged in Wuhan — a city 1,000 miles from nearest wild bats with SARS-like coronaviruses, but that contains labs conducting world’s largest research program on bat SARS-like coronaviruses.”

Yeah, ground zero for COVID-19 just happens to be a short walk from one of the only places in the world that monkeys around with such deadly dangerous things. What are the odds?

A bit more than a year ago, the U.S. government issued its summary statement about its investigation of COVID-19’s origins, infuriatingly shrugging and declaring: “The [intelligence community] remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19. All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”

How much did the Bank of Beijing pay our intel community to publish such a weak, watered-down, mealy-mouthed assessment?

Think about how desperately the ChiComs want to convince the world that all those people — including more than a million here in the U.S. — didn’t die due to their gross carelessness and incompetence.

Now ask yourself whether that secretive, rapacious, and genocidal communist regime is above stonewalling the search for truth, fixing the findings, or at least blurring the lines so that no definitive conclusion is reachable.

Ask yourself, too, whether it seems that our president and our whole federal government ought to be demanding answers to the origins of a virus that killed almost as many Americans as all our wars combined. Could it be that Joe Biden has been compromised by the Chinese? Could it also be that the man in charge of our nation’s COVID-19 response, Anthony Fauci, actually funded the Chinese research that ultimately blew up in our faces?

As Journalist Thomas Fazi writes in a piece titled “The Lab Leak Theory Isn’t Dead”:

Considering the endless ways in which the pandemic and our response to it have changed the lives of every human being on the planet, it’s astonishing to consider how little is actually known about the origins of the virus. Two and half years on, we are still very much in the dark as to when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made its appearance.

This isn’t because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery have proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been systematically thwarted by the world’s two most powerful governments: America and China. This is the mother of all Covid conspiracy theories — but it’s also true.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty weighs the latest developments and, by way of deliberately gross understatement, reminds us what we’re up against in our search for the truth: “A lot of this comes down to whether you think the Chinese government is making a genuine, good-faith effort to find the origin of the virus.”

Good faith? The Communist Chinese? Really?

But if COVID-19 came from a wet market, as the Chinese insist, why on earth are those deadly dangerous wet markets still open? As Geraghty writes, “If Covid-19 started at this or some other wet market, the Chinese and Wuhan authorities are not acting like they are particularly worried about a repeat.”

As Geraghty continues: “I think the Chinese government would prefer that the origin of the virus remain a mystery; that way, it doesn’t have to admit any fault, permanently shut down any wet markets, or allow international inspectors into its biological-research labs. Our current confusion, division, and waning interest is exactly the outcome that works out best for China.”

Geraghty’s conclusion is utterly unsatisfying: “We don’t know how the Covid-19 pandemic started, and a lot of people are just fine with that mystery remaining unsolved.”

Frankly, we’d much rather listen to the aforementioned Professor Ebright, who, as Not the Bee writes, has the receipts.

After laying out the evidence for a lab origin in a detailed series of tweets, Ebright concludes: “In 2020-present, [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and its funders/collaborators at EcoHealth Alliance have withheld information, misrepresented facts, and obstructed investigation … even though, if not connected to origin, they most easily could clear their name though cooperation with investigation.”

Seems there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, Pennsylvania. If we can’t conclusively figure out where it came from, heaven help us.