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COVID-19: Human Life vs. Political Strife


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Key Points

  • Secretary of State Tony Blinken has declared that China must now cooperate with the United States to find the answers.

Politics has played a very large role in the COVID-19 pandemic from the very beginning and that hasn’t changed much over the last 18-20 months. What has changed is the reaction to, and the attention on, the lab in Wuhan, China. When former President Trump raised questions about China’s role in the spread of the virus, many called him xenophobic.

It appears that our government’s position has changed as Secretary of State Tony Blinken has declared that China must now cooperate with the United States to find the answers. How he intends to enforce this participation, or issue reprimands if the outcome determines China knew what it was doing all along, still remains to be seen. A piece from Just the News discusses just how toxic the environment was for researchers trying to find answers regarding the virus:

The lab-leak hypothesis postulates that the SARS-Cov-2 virus may have escaped from a Chinese coronavirus lab located just a few miles from the first known outbreak of COVID-19. The suspicion was largely ignored or dismissed as a conspiracy theory by much of the press and scientific community over the past year.

The lab-leak theory has gained mainstream credibility — including among major politicians — only over the past few months. Last month, an international team of nearly twenty scientists released a public letter in the journal Science stating that the lab-leak theory was a “viable” hypothesis and calling for a “transparent, objective, data-driven” investigation.

In recent weeks, several public health experts and officials have suggested that part of the reluctance of scientists to call for investigations into the hypothesis may have been because Trump was a proponent of the theory at the outset of the pandemic last year.

In a major report on the lab-leak theory in Vanity Fair this month, Miles Yu — a China strategist with the State Department — said that the international scientific community responded with “maddening silence” after Trump’s early endorsement of the theory. “Anyone who dares speak out would be ostracized,” he claimed.

Maybe now we can get to the bottom of this strain of the Sars virus, and put human life ahead of political bias.