The steady stream of apologies ought to be rolling in any minute now.

Aaaaanyyyy minute now.

Granted, the American people have mostly moved beyond COVID-19, both literally and figuratively. But there are still some vital housekeeping matters to take care of — and as of this week, one less of them: We now know definitively, not speculatively, from whence it came. As independent journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag write on Substack:

After years of official pronouncements to the contrary, significant new evidence has emerged that strengthens the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.

“Strengthens the case”? These gents are being too modest. This closes the case and puts a nail in its coffin, to mix our metaphors. It’s one thing to identify the Wuhan lab as the source of the deadly scourge, but it’s another thing entirely to name individual names, which is what this new report does: the aforementioned Ben Hu, and Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. These are three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2, and they all worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

B-b-b-but, but, they could’ve all been shopping for some fresh dog or pangolin at that nearby wet market!

Yeah, right.

This, of course, isn’t the first time that anyone has claimed COVID-19 came from a lab. Heck, this humble correspondent has been claiming it for years. And doubling down on it.

As for those apologies, we aren’t holding our breath. Still, it’s instructive to remember just how wrong these people have been proven to be. Even lefty Jon Stewart, who came out of retirement to address his people’s Krazy Glue adherence to the theory that a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and resulted in the deaths of — depending on who’s counting — more than 1.1 million deaths in the U.S. and nearly seven million deaths worldwide.

It’s also worth remembering the evolution of the blame. As first, everyone was calling it “the Wuhan coronavirus.” But then the ChiComs put the arm on their leftist fellow travelers here in the U.S., and pretty soon it became racist to imply that the Wuhan coronavirus was in fact the Wuhan coronavirus. Take a look.

But merely identifying the Wuhan lab and its earliest victims isn’t the end of it. There’s also the matter of the Chinese military’s involvement. As Shellenberger writes elsewhere on Substack: “You may recall that The New York Times called Robert F. Kennedy a ‘conspiracy theorist’ for saying Covid resulted from a bio-weapons program. And yet one of the State Department cables [which were recently obtained via a FOIA request] shows a connection between China’s biotechnology sector and the Chinese military (People’s Liberation Army), which included its construction of the Wuhan lab.”

The ChiComs’ military involvement in COVID-19 gained momentum earlier this week, when the UK’s Sunday Times published a bombshell report about it. As our Nate Jackson wrote:

Researchers “were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus,” the Times says. This gain-of-function research using viruses collected from bats was funded in part with U.S. taxpayer money funneled from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through EcoHealth Alliance, which almost certainly lied to keep the funding coming, and conducted by “researchers from the Chinese military” who were “pursuing bioweapons.”

We wonder: Will the commie apologists affix the “RACIST!” label to those of us who are now suggesting, with ever-increasing evidence, that the Red Chinese military is behind all this? Time will tell. And time will tell whether the ChiComs will pay any real price for what they’ve done. (By the way: How is it racist to think that the Chinese are both intelligent enough to develop a deadly virus and stupid enough to accidentally leak it, but it’s not racist to accuse them of shopping at these weird wet markets and eating dogs and bats and pangolins and hedgehogs?)

National Review’s Jim Geraghty reminds us what happened to an honest Chinese doctor who tried to alert the rest of the world to what was happening back when it could’ve saved millions of lives:

The problem was that when those doctors tried to pull the alarm, the local, regional, and national Chinese government authorities above them kept shutting down their efforts until it was too late. Dr. Li Wenliang got dragged into a police station and was berated for “rumormongering” and for “publishing untrue statements,” and threatened with prosecution. A little more than a month later, the virus that he had desperately tried to warn his countrymen and the world about killed him.

Earlier in the week, Geraghty noted an exhaustive Times of London piece which leads folks to a single inevitable conclusion — or one of two conclusions, if you’re a dead-ender who can’t agree with Donald Trump under any circumstances: “Either Covid-19 plagued the globe because of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in late 2019, or an absolutely remarkable series of coincidences, against overwhelming odds, led to a virus that has never been found in nature infecting a human being just down the road where the WIV was doing gain-of-function research on the virus in nature that is most similar to SARS-CoV-2.”

The question now is: What are we going to do about it — not only with respect to the Chinese, who have yet to atone for it, but also regarding those here in the U.S. who went to such extraordinary lengths to defend the purveyors, to hide the truth, and to rewrite history?

As blogger and public health expert Michael Hanna writes, “The most troubling part for me is knowing that this will likely happen again, and again — unless some very nasty consequences are brought to bear for those who knowingly or unknowingly enabled this unmitigated disaster in funding and oversight of biohazardous research.”

Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins: looking at you.

*Updated with additional thoughts on so-called racism, and more material on COVID-19’s undeniable lab origins and the need for accountability.