Hearing on COVID origins reveals massive pushback against early backers of lab leak theory

WASHINGTON (TND) — After three years, multiple virus variants and 6.8 million worldwide deaths, there are still no definitive answers on the origins of COVID-19.

It's a question now being investigated by a new subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, with new revelations about just how widespread the pushback was on the hypothesis the virus leaked from a lab.

When a small handful of us in the earliest days of the pandemic began raising the possibility of a lab origin, there was just ferociously strong headwinds," said Dr. Jamie Metzl, Ph.D, who is a former member of World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee and currently a senior fellow at The Atlantic Council.

Metzl, as well as others, reacted Wednesday to their initial shock about apaper published in March of 2020, apparently edited and approved by Dr. Anthony Fauci, which argued that the virus came from nature, an animal host, before zoonotic transfer. The authors of the study also reiterated, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory based scenario is plausible.”

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said the prevailing viewpoint pushed out others in the first weeks and months of the pandemic.

Three years ago, if you thought it came from a lab, if you raised that, you were called a nut job, you got censored on Twitter, you were blacklisted on Twitter," Jordan said.

Robert Redfield, who served as CDC Director at the time, said ,“I think the most upsetting thing to me was the Baltimore Sun calling me a racist because I said this came from a Wuhan lab."

It’s a point of view now backed by both the FBI and the Department of Energy, which see the lab leak theory as most likely.

During the hearing, some Democrats also said the reason there are so few answers is because of former President Donald Trump.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, said there are at least 42 examples of Trump praising Chinese President Xi Jinping for his hard work and "transparency" on the pandemic.

Raskin blamed him for not coming up with a national strategy to fight the virus and “for telling Americans that COVID would magically disappear at Easter time or everybody should just take hydroxychloroquine, or not wearing a mask or never developing a national plan to defeat the disease."

Lawmakers in both parties emphasized the need to follow the facts and that many of the facts remain unavailable because China has been relentless in blocking access to locations or data that could help.